Say to yourself at the start of the day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people. They are subject to all these defects because they have no knowledge of good and bad. But I, who have observed the nature of the good, and seen that it is the right; and of the bad, and seen that it is the wrong; and of the wrongdoer himself, and seen that his nature is akin to my own—not...
[T]rue education consists precisely in this, in learning to wish that everything should come about just as it does. And how do things come about? As the one who ordains them has ordained… It is with this order of things in mind that we should approach our education, and not so as to change the existing order of things (for that has not been permitted to us, nor would it be better that it should be), but rather, things around...
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...
So, what is traditional Stoicism? Ironically, “traditional Stoicism” is something new; it is used almost exclusively on social media to describe what was traditionally known simply as Stoicism. This new modifier became necessary with the recent advent of “modern Stoicism.” In a nutshell, traditional Stoics attempt to remain as close as possible to the path created by the founders, which includes three fields of study and practice—logic, physics, and ethics. Modern Stoics diverge from the Stoic’s original path because they...
This site will provide content and resources for people interested in the study and practice of Stoicism as it is represented in the surviving Stoic texts and interpreted by reputable scholars. Traditional Stoics attempts to follow, as much as possible, the same path toward excellence and happiness trod by Roman Senator, Seneca; freed slave turned philosopher, Epictetus; and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Those who attempt to follow the traditional Stoic path take the founder’s claims about the integrated nature of...
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