a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3609 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Stoicism: a practical philosophy you can actually use

You misunderstand; I did not want Meditations to do that. I think it's actually possible philosophy has gone backward in the last 2000 years. Or possibly jumped in front of a bus.





briandmyers  ·  3608 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    it's actually possible philosophy has gone backward in the last 2000 years

It has certainly changed considerably, at least. For the Greeks and Romans, philosophy was expected to guide one in how to live one's daily life. That role is mostly expected to be filled by religion nowadays, not by philosophy.

user-inactivated  ·  3609 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hadot agrees with you. I don't think I do. We've gained precision, and the cost of that is that we know when we're waving our hands. It turns out when you're talking about big things like how people in general ought to live, you invariably wave your hands a lot. It makes attempts to talk about them look ridiculous, and trying to talk about them feel ridiculous. But the ancients were waving their hands too, they just didn't know it.

user-inactivated  ·  3609 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The greatest hand-waver of them all was dear Bertrand, though. I always secretly pretended he was Bertie Wooster's namesake.

In all seriousness, I tried to articulate what I disagree with here and I can't, really. Just that I've read a lot of post-Renaissance philosophy and a lot of classical philosophy and a bare handful in between and I know which era I'd pick if I was on a desert island. If that's the best rationalization I can mount, though, I clearly don't belong with Descartes anyway.