“The thought for today is one which I discovered in Epicurus; for I am wont to cross over even into the enemy’s camp — not as a deserter, but as a scout,” says Seneca to Lucilius in Letter II, On Discursiveness in Reading, 5. He writes this because he had made a habit, for a […]
With this post I am going to begin an in-depth coverage of the second edition of Larry Becker’s fundamental book, A New Stoicism, without question the most serious attempt to “update” Stoicism from the end of its first half-millennium run, in the second century of the modern era. I have commented on the previous edition […]
I just finished co-running Stoic Camp New York-2017, together with my friend Greg Lopez. We had 20 students and an amazing time up in Stony Point, on the West Bank of the Hudson River, north of New York. As part of the introductory session, we went through the basics of Stoic theory as reported by […]
One of the most famous secondary sources on Stoicism is a collection of six essays by Cicero (who considered himself an Academic Platonist, but was sympathetic to Stoicism), entitled Paradoxa Stoicorum, or Stoic paradoxes. Indeed, the Stoics were well known for a number of precepts and standard phrases that sounded decidedly paradoxical to the uninitiated. […]
The Hellenistic period, which is typically defined as going from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) to the rise of the Roman Empire (marked by the battle of Actium, 31 BCE) saw the flourishing of a bewildering number of new philosophical schools, of which Stoicism was of course one. I have discussed […]
One of the things I truly enjoy about Stoicism is its alleged “paradoxes.” Cicero wrote a whole book to explain them, and they still puzzle people when they first (and second, and third) encounter them. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to think that the Stoics perversely enjoyed to present their doctrines in the form of […]
Wisdom is something that pretty much all philosophical and religious traditions seek. While it isn’t a popular concept in modern academic philosophy departments, that’s a bad reflection on the latter, not on the former. The Greeks since Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics distinguished two different kinds of wisdom: phronesis, or practical wisdom, and sophia, or “transcendental” wisdom. […]
We have seen some of the major arguments that Cicero uses against the Stoics, in book IV of his De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Goods and Evils), and I’m going to complete my brief analysis in this post. At #48 we find a fascinating, and in some sense, very modern, passage: […]
I have now being studying Stoicism intensively for close to a year and a half, and this year I’m ratcheting things up by devoting my sabbatical to it, a project that will culminate in the writing of How To Be A Stoic (the book), and the offering at City College of a course on ancient vs […]
Amathia. It is often translated as “ignorance,” as in the following two famous quotes from Socrates: “Wisdom alone, is the good for man, ignorance the only evil” (Euthydemus 281d) “There is, he said, only one good, that is, knowledge, and only one evil, that is, ignorance” (in Diogenes Laertius, II.31)
How to Be a Stoic 
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