It escapes most people, that the study of arguments which have equivocal or hypothetical premises, and those which are developed by questioning, and, in a word, all such arguments, has a connection with how we should behave in our lives. For what we seek in every matter is how the virtuous man may find the path he should follow and the way he should behave with regard to it. (Discourses 1.7.1) This is the second of several posts that will...
Who is making progress, then? The person who has read many treatises by Chrysippus? Why, does virtue consist in this, in having gained a thorough knowledge of Chrysippus? For if that is the case, we must agree progress is nothing other than knowing many works of Chrysippus. ~ Epictetus “What now?” That was the question I asked myself after I completed my first course of study in Stoicism. Like most people who turn to Stoicism for answers, I was seeking...
Prosochē, the practice of attention, is the fundamental spiritual attitude necessary to practice Stoicism as a way of life.[1] It is the practice of consistent, vigilant attention to impressions, assents, desires, and actions, for the purpose of creating excellence (virtue) in one’s inner self and thereby experiencing a good flow in life (eudaimonia). This post is excerpted from an essay I wrote on prosochē in 2013, if you find this post interesting, I encourage you to read the essay. What...
I recently finished Barbara Ehrenreich’s thought-provoking book, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything. Some may be familiar with her 2010 New York Times bestseller, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. Barbara is an atheist, a third generation atheist in fact. Moreover, she was educated as a scientist. Nevertheless, she had an unnerving experience in her mid-teens that she ignored for most of her adult life because it defied the materialist conception of reality she adhered...
Stoic ethics is interdependent with a specific model of the cosmos. The Stoics rejected and argued stridently against the random, meaningless universe of the Epicureans. In contrast, the Stoics built their philosophy around a rational, intelligent, and providentially ordered cosmos. They considered this worldview essential to their systematic philosophy because it provides the necessary framework for Stoic ethical theory and practice. There are numerous outstanding expositions of Stoic ethical theory. Since I am not defending Stoic ethical theory, I will...
NOTE: An updated version of this blog post and an accompanying Stoicism On Fire podcast episode is available here. Many people introduced to Stoicism by twenty-first-century popularizers are surprised by the religious nature of the philosophy. The deafening silence on this topic leaves most people unaware of the deep religious piety of the Stoics. This silence belies the copious references to divinity and providence in the Stoic texts and the extensive scholarship, from a variety of fields, acknowledging the religious nature...
Modern popularizations of Stoicism, which ignore physics, diverge from the historical understanding of Stoicism in a dramatic way to accommodate a secular worldview. Unfortunately, such departures strip Stoicism of its soul. What remains is often only a shell of the deeply spiritual, philosophical system which inspired the lives, writing, and teaching of Stoics like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism is a holistic philosophical system, and it takes only a minimal amount of time and effort to discover that scholars...
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