Stoic Meditations

In consoling Marcia, Seneca reminds her that one's virtue is on display when the universe challenges with adversity, not when life glides easily with a favoring current. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Our feelings may end up feeding upon their own bitterness, until the unhappy mind takes a morbid delight in grief. But we can challenge the cognitive component of our own emotions and move forward. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Stoicism leads us to a life of benevolence toward other human beings, in pursuit of a constant refinement of our  judgments and understanding of how the world actually works — so that we can more effectively live in it. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Plato said that "every soul is deprived of the truth against its will." Which means that we need to treat people who make mistakes with sympathy, not criticize and dismiss them. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Cicero's reports a famous metaphor used by Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, to explain the progression from perception to assent to comprehension to knowledge. Which is then used as a reminder about the limits of our own knowledge. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

According to Chrysippus, when it's all said and done, there are only three conceptions of the chief good for human beings. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Aristo of Chios disagreed with the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, in pretty fundamental ways. A powerful reminder that Stoic philosophy isn't written in stone, and never was. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

The basic Stoic psychological account of our desires and actions is a powerful guide to willfully change our behavior for the better. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Let's learn why the middle-Stoic Panaetius disagreed on a major point of "physics" with the early Stoics: he didn't believe in divination! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

The Academic Skeptics were one of the major rival schools to Stoicism. Yet, on the nature of human knowledge, and on what it means in practice, for everyday living, the two philosophies were not very far apart. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

If you have some sand and you start adding grains, when do you have a heap? Chrysippus' answer to this sort of paradox will leave logicians frustrated and the rest of us with something to think about. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

The wisest approach is to not commit to opinions until we have strong evidence in their favor, or to hold opinions very lightly, and not attach our ego to them. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

The Stoics are materialists, in the sense that they believe that anything that has causal powers must be made of stuff, whatever that stuff turns out to be. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Virtue can only be perfected by reason; all virtues are really just one, namely, wisdom; virtue is intrinsically good; and one needs to continuously practice in order to be virtuous. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic sect, says that there are three sets of things in the world: virtue, things according or contra to nature, and neutral things. From which a solid moral compass for everyday living follows. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Socrates was the first to draw philosophy away from matters of an abstruse character, in which all the philosophers before his time had been wholly occupied, and to have diverted it to the objects of ordinary life. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Cicero begins his treatise Academica by seeking a medicine for his sorrows in philosophy. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Blame is not a Stoic thing. We bear responsibility for what we do, of course, but to blame people isn’t particularly useful. As Marcus Aurelius says, teach them, if you can, or bear with them. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

Paris stole Menelaus' wife, Helen, thereby starting the Trojan War. He did that because he assented to the impression that it was good to pursue the wife of his host, and that misjudgment resulted in ten years of misery for so many. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support

And what is this Good? I shall tell you: it is a free mind, an upright mind, subjecting other things to itself and itself to nothing. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support