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| Writer | Massimo Pigliucci |
| Category | Self Development |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
| Publish Date | 2017 |
| Pages | 216 |
| File Size | 2 MB |
| File Type |
THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT OF A PERSONAL SPIRITUAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, and intellectual journey that began many years ago and has taken many twists and turns. And I’m sure this won’t be the endpoint either. Many people have directly or indirectly contributed to my journey, and I would like to acknowledge a few of them: Enrica Chiaromonte, my high school philosophy teacher, who instilled in me a passion for the subject that took a quarter-century to finally blossom.
How to Be A Stoic PDF – Massimo Pigliucci
Melissa Brenneman, for her support when I made the crazy decision to change careers and become a philosopher; Corinna Colatore, for being there since the beginning of my journey into Stoicism and bearing with my daily practice, no matter how inconvenient it may become at times. How to Be A Stoic PDF
My colleagues at the City College of New York, for their support of my idiosyncratic approach to our discipline; the many people behind Stoic Week and STOICON, through whom I discovered Stoicism, and who have welcomed and helped me throughout; my fellow Stoic (and Buddhist) Greg Lopez, who has taught me much about Epictetus, Marcus, and Seneca.
Tisse Takagi, my agent, who has been enthusiastic about this project since the beginning and has been an invaluable guide throughout; T. J. Kelleher, my editor at Basic Books, whose professionalism keeps striking me every time we work together; and my very careful copyeditor, Cindy Buck.
How to Be A Stoic PDF – Massimo Pigliucci
Throughout this book, we have talked about ethics, specifically from the point of view of the Stoics. Ethics, of course, is one of the classical branches of philosophy, the other ones being aesthetics (concerned with beauty and art), epistemology (the study of how we know things), logic (dedicated to understanding reason), and metaphysics (to comprehend the nature of the world). How to Be A Stoic PDF
But as we saw at the beginning of the book, “ethics” has a different meaning today than it did for the ancient Greco-Romans, and of course, the Stoics’ wasn’t the only approach to its study. While modern ethics is essentially concerned with which actions are right or wrong, premodern philosophers conceived of ethics as the much broader inquiry into how to live a happy life, the pursuit of which they deemed to be a human being’s most important endeavor.
But a happy life can be pursued in different ways, depending on which concept of eudaimonia—the flourishing life—one adopts. The major Hellenistic schools of philosophy differed primarily on just this point, and it is useful to get a sense of what the alternatives to Stoicism were—and still are.
How to Be A Stoic PDF – Massimo Pigliucci
After all, together with A Guide to the Good Life’s author, Bill Irvine, I believe that adopting and adapting a philosophy of life to guide you is more important than whichever specific philosophy you end up choosing. True, there are some pretty awful “philosophies” out there that are not conducive to human flourishing. How to Be A Stoic PDF
But several alternatives may make more sense to you personally—I don’t want to leave you with the incorrect impression that it’s Stoicism or bust! I will not discuss the variety of life philosophies that arose within the Eastern tradition—Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and the like—because I simply don’t know enough about them, and because there are already plenty of excellent resources out there that the interested reader can make use of.
Here, it will be instructive to take a quick look at those that came out of the Western tradition in the Hellenistic period, before the rise of Christianity. What follows is a simplified genealogical tree of the major Hellenistic schools that either focused on or had a lot to say about the good life.
How to Be A Stoic PDF
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