Living Stoicism

Socratic Philosophy for the 21st Century

Stoic Physics

  • In Defence of Stoic Physics

    This post argues that the Greek “four elements” are not mystical substances but early descriptions of physical phase states: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. The Greeks understood heating, cooling, expansion, contraction, and the behaviour of matter long before the Stoics, and this conceptual framework is traceable earlier natural philosophers. When the Stoic scheme is compared… Continue reading

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  • Stoic Cosmology and Ethics

    The Stoics had a naturalistic ethics based on an understanding of behaviors that can be identified as appropriate to any animal, in the specific case of humans, as social creatures endowed with language and language based reason, we are innately equipped with the potential to identify what is beneficial in the world, and what is… Continue reading

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About Living Stoicism

Living Stoicism is an idea to broaden the scope of discussion and understanding around Stoic philosophy.

Beyond the applications of the Stoic theories of emotion and well-being, Stoicism has significant contributions to make to modern philosophy, psychology, science and ethics.

In the same way that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus still influence modern thinking, the thinking of Zeno, Chrysippus and their heirs can once more become central to our ways of looking at the world.

Most importantly, an emphasis is placed on personal ethics, how they relate to Stoic logic and physics, and what the individual can do to affect society in positive ways.

To quote Marcus Aurelius,

“Since you yourself are one of the parts that serve to perfect a social system, let your every action contribute to the perfecting of social life. Any action of yours, then, which has no reference, whether direct or indirect, to these social ends, tears your life apart, prevents it from being at one, and creates division, as does the citizen in a state who for his own part cuts himself off from the concord of his fellows.”

Meditations, 9.23 

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