KIERAN’s Reviews > The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness > Status Update

Good people are NOT invincible, Epictetus, and it is folly to suggest that they are.

Also, that statement contradicts many of the statements you've made previously about accepting what you can't control and accepting that the world is not as you wish.

Also, all the vague appeals to nature without defining what that is are really starting to irk me.

He cautions against fallacious thinking, yet the appeal to nature is itself a fallacy.

I'm impressed that Epictetus can understand that women feel pressured to be pretty and even goes into the why of it.

However, his "inner beauty is what matters" platitude isn't really enough. I feel he ought to think more and more about sexism before he opens his mouth about it.

Also, in one instance he says "care for your body", but also that the mind is more important than the body.

Because romantic love is a key ingredient in the success of most, if not all marriages and committed relationships.

And yet many a-romantic people are not necessarily asexual. They have carnal desires, if not romantic ones, and it is unfair to deny a-romantic people sexual pleasures just because they aren't served well by marriage & committed relationships.

I personally am not a fan of casual sex myself, but I feel that casually instructing others not to, as Epictetus does here (even as ironically, he says not to try and discourage others from it!) is very, very small-minded.

For example: there are plenty of a-romantic people who would not be served well by things like marriage + long-term relationships.

And again, what if your family/community/country's customs are actively amoral and go against virtue.

Like, for example: slavery, segregation, religious intolerance, denying women's rights...

Again, more contradictions.

"fix your resolve on expecting justice and goodness and order" and "don't demand or expect that events happen as you would wish them to"

Huge contradiction. You can't both expect things to be good and just while at the same NOT trying to expect things to go as you wish.

Unless you're actively wishing for bad things to happen, I guess.

"Don't consent to be hurt and you won't" that's bullshit.

"you have obligations to your father even if he is an objectively terrible person" is TERRIBLE advice.

Also, this philosophy is very contradictory. Only now it does it acknowledge that humans are part of a community and have obligations. But before, it was very hyper-individualistic and detached.

Plus, it makes the path of wisdom sound very culty.