Chris has been working on a series of very well written, and heavily researched articles on Stoic Piety for the past few weeks. His most recent iteration, is on Epictetus.
The religious character of The Discourses is apparent to anyone who has read them, and despite the modern trend of wanting to discount any form of non-atheism in Stoicism the case for the religious nature of the school is well founded.
Head on over, give his article a read. It’s worth the time.
“For when children come up to us and clap their hands and say, ‘A good Saturnalia to you to-day!’ do we say ‘These things are not good’? Not at all, we clap with them ourselves. So, when you cannot change a man’s opinion, recognize that he is a child, clap with him, and if you do not wish to do this, you have only to hold your peace.”
— Epictetus, Discourses I.29
If you’re running an Android device, and you’d like to provide some feedback, I would surely take it. You’ll need to be able install apps from third part sources. No guarantee or warranted is offered.
Use the below link from your Android device for easiest install.
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ὁ κόσμος ἀλλοίωσις, ὁ βίος ὑπόληψις.
The universe is transformation: life is opinion.— Marcus, Meditations IV.3
So, it’s very common to see these infographics (I won’t call this one a meme) with pseudo-deep, intellectual sounding life advise. Generally, it’s harmless crap. Occasionally, it offers (from a Stoic perspective) really bad advice. I came across one such piece of digital flotsam, and decided to correct it.
A rebuttal which I wrote is up on Stoicism Today at Exeter.
http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stoicismtoday/2015/10/07/are-stoics-ascetics-a-rebuttal-by-kevin-patrick/
Please find below the newest eBook of my collection, a series of dialogues with a hypothetical Sage. It was an interesting process to write this, and I hope you enjoy it.
This weekend I had my second session for studying Koine. My tutor is very personable and we get along well. Although my background is linguistics (specifically syntax and phonology), this tutor’s teaching style is less “here’s a chart of declensions to learn” and more “let’s talk in Greek about your family.”
We’re using the pronunciation values for modern Greek, which is closer to how Koine would have sounded than the ecclesiastical or Erasmian pronunciation schemes.
So far, I’m enjoying it. I haven’t had a serious language project in some time, which is something I have missed.
At these early days, there are two immediate issues.
1) I cannot predict Greek stress. Like, not all.
2) The Greek question mark is ” ; ” and not ” ? ” .
I’m used to having very good intuition for Slavic languages about stress, which is not helping and is in fact hurting my acquisition of Koine Greek. Luckily, in most of the texts I have available, the stress is overtly marker with an acute accent mark.
For some reason the Greek question mark throws me for a loop. I’ll get used to it in time, but as of know it interfers with the smoothness of my reading and writing.
I’m really looking forward to being able to read our classic Stoics in the primary language. I’ll keep you updated on my progress!
Stoicism is made up of several core axioms. Among them is the idea that the universe is conscious and providential. I’ve argued for the traditional perspective of the conscious cosmos before, and today I’d like to examine the idea of Fate a bit more.
Classically, Fate can be understood in a variety of ways.
1) A general fate for the cosmos. A big picture.
2) A personal Fate for each individual.
– Either Fated events or
– A single Fate: the day of one’s death.
3) Fate as a personality and divine force, (Zeus. Moirai, Clotho, etc.).
Today, the concept of Fate is out of favor… sort of. The common western perspective is that we live in a mechanistic universe where specific causes yield specific effects. Common sense supports this, if I push a glass off the edge of the counter, it will fall to the ground unless stopped. Several causes are involved.
Causal determinism is form of Fate, albeit a very mild one. There is a Non-Stoic chreia about Fate that I quite like:
A rich and mighty Persian was walking in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him,
“Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?” he asked.
“I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,” said Death.
In Stoic terminology, the glass and the Persian servant both have Fates, but they are co-fated with several causes. In the case of the glass, if all of these are present except ‘me the pusher’ the glass is fated to rest on the counter top. If ‘me the pusher’ is present, and I do so, it is fated to fall.
We could assign numbers to the liklihood of each of these fates, and to the liklihood of each of the contributing causes. Because the Stoic doctrine of Fate contains the ideas of “co-fatedness,” a modern might look at this and say, “We’re discussing probability.”
Additionally, since for the Stoics we have the idea of causa sui, with the rational creature as a ’cause of itself’ we can see something like Conditional Probability in Stoic theory as well.
Personally, I rather like the utility of the mental model of Fate as a challenge or test: the idea that an unending chain of causes going back to the beginning of the cosmos has been brought about for this particular instance for me to show virtue. This seems more useful to me on a day by day basis.
My point being, there is a modern trend to cut away seemingly anachronistic parts of traditional Stoicism, but as I continue to argue, the traditional perspective is not usually opposed to the modern one. How much of what we believe today has parallel, albeit in romantic or poetic language, in the theory and cosmology of the classical Stoics?
I would heartily suggest that one reinterprets those parts of Stoicism which they may have discarded, in favor of this view. Instead of asking what we can cut away, let us ask, how much of this can we keep?
This weekend I started out with a tutor to learn Koine Greek. Hopefully this time next year I can read the classical sources for myself. I think my studies are at the point where being able to read the works in their native language would be helpful. Working in translation is not bad, it got me here.
But this way, at least when I’m working with a translation I’ll then have two opinions on the definitions: theirs and mine. As of now, I rely on a “priestly class” of translators to make philosophy accessible to me.
Just trying to cut out the middle man.
There’s a long way to go to get there, though.
Mountain Stoic 
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