Massimo Pigliucci's Blog, page 21

Epictetus and the chamber pot

“In order to determine what is and isn’t reasonable, we not only take account of the values of external things, but each of us also takes his role into consideration.

For one person it’s reasonable to fetch someone else’s chamber pot, because he’s focused on the fact that, if he doesn’t do it, he’ll be flogged and denied food, while, if he does, nothing unpleasant or painful will happen to him.

But another person not only considers it unbearable to do that but can’t stand even the idea of someone ...

Aristotle vs the Stoics: part II, ethics

Aristotle (left) and Zeno of Citium (right).

Did the Stoics come up with an innovative, powerful philosophy of life? Or did they just take Aristotle’s stuff, changed the language here and there, and called it a day? The possibility has often been raised, all the way back to Cicero’s On the Ends of Good and Evil, that Stoicism may differ more in wording than in substance from its Aristotelian counterpart. Is that true?

I have explored the issue at a recent workshop in practical philosophy that I ha...

E-book: A Short Guide to the Inner Citadel

Dear Reader,

Here is the fifth installment of my ongoing series of free e-books based on essays that have appeared either here at Figs in Winter or at one of my previous blogs.

This new collection presents an in-depth yet accessible commentary on one of the classics of modern Stoicism: Pierre Hadot’s The Inner Citadel, first published in English in 1998.

Hadot’s book is ostensively about Marcus Aurelius, the emperor-philosopher, but in fact about half of it concerns the philosophy of Epictetus, the...

Plato on the need for expertise

“[Lysimachus] ‘I am asking you, Socrates, because it seems as if our council needs someone to act as umpire.’

[Socrates] ‘What, Lysimachus? Do you intend to follow whatever course the majority of us recommends?’

[Lysimachus] ‘Yes, what alternative is there, Socrates?’

[Socrates] ‘Imagine there was some discussion about the kind of athletic training your son should practice: would you be influenced by the majority of us, or by the man who happened to have trained and exercised under a good coach. … ...

Aristotle vs the Stoics: part I, metaphysics and logic

Zeno of Citium (left) and Aristotle (right).

[Cato] “I admit that some parts [of Stoic teachings] are obscure, yet the Stoics do not affect an obscure style on purpose; the obscurity is inherent in the doctrines themselves.”

[Cicero] “How is it, then, that when the same doctrines are expounded by the Peripatetics, every word is intelligible?”

[Cato] “The same doctrines? Have I not said enough to show that the disagreement between the Stoics and Peripatetics is not a matter of words, but concerns th...

Suggested Readings

Woman with wax tablets and stylus (so-called "Sappho"), Naples Archeological Museum

Would a society of intellectuals be a better place? Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ is probably his greatest novel, his deepest, most intriguing, most hackerish in spirit. It combines a theory of history and education with lessons in Zen, meditations on the enduring power of institutions, friendship, duty and excellence, forays into the psychology of genius, a description of life at a hacker paradise like th...

Cicero on the nature of the soul

“There are many who labor on the other side of the question, and condemn souls to death, as if they were criminals capitally convicted; nor have they any other reason to allege why the immortality of the soul appears to them to be incredible, except that they are not able to conceive what sort of thing the soul can be when disentangled from the body; just as if they could really form a correct idea as to what sort of thing it is, even when it is in the body; what its form, and size, and abode ar...

The story of Pseudo-Seneca

Pseudo-Seneca at the National Roman Museum in Rome, photo by the Author.

If you are interested in Stoicism you have likely heard of the story of the so-called “Pseudo-Seneca,” but just in case, here it is. Stoicism had ceased to be an independent school of philosophy in the ancient world well before the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. Some of the other schools lingered only a bit longer, until the Byzantine emperor Justinian I closed the last of them, the Academy in Athens, in 529.

But ...

Video chat: James Romm on Seneca

James Romm

Welcome to the fourth of an occasional series of video chats with authors and translators who have written about the philosophy, culture, and history of the Greco-Roman tradition.

In this episode I talk to James Romm, author and translator of a number of books on Seneca, including Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, How to Give: An Ancient Guide to Giving and Receiving, How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management, and How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of ...

Facing old age and death: a study in contrasts

Image from pxhere.com.

“We do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day.” (Seneca, Letter 24.19)

Aging and death have been on my mind more than usual, of late. Not because I’m particularly old, yet. Nor because I’m facing imminent demise, that I know of. Rather, I’ve been interacting on and off with two relatives, let’s call them Eda and Oddo (not their real names!). They have given me much to reflect on because they are both older than I am (and about ...