My occasional Stoic Camp student, Doug Bates, a follower of Pyrrho, has written a scathing attack on Academic Skepticism, the subject of my latest book. I asked my guide for the book, Marcus Tullius Cicero, to please write a response to Doug. Here it is.

Let me begin with a concessio, granting Mr. Bates two of his points. First, he is right that the word I used to render my colleague Carneades’s crucial concept of pithanon (more on this later), that is, probabilis, did not mean for me what moderns understand by “probability.” The statistical reading is an anachronism, and translators who have adopted it have done damage. The two concepts are of course related etymologically, but conceptually what we members of the New Academy proposed was a multi-step process to assess the truth-likeness of an impression, not a mathematical-quantitative approach.

Second, Mr. Bates is also correct that the philosophy of the New Academy does not lead to tranquillity, or ataraxia. We never promised that, as it simply isn’t what we value in life.

That said, much in the essay to which I am responding follows from a single unexamined premise: that a theory of assent must be judged for its efficacy as therapy. Since I reject that premise, Mr. Bates’s argument utterly collapses.

Let me expand on this particular point, as it is crucial. The philosophy of the New Academy, what you moderns call “Academic Skepticism,” is an epistemic stance, not what the Greeks called a bios, that is, a form of life. We derived our bios, of course, from Platonism. After all, Carneades, Philo of Larissa, myself and others were members of the Platonic Academy, although in my personal case – as I have written in several of my treatises (e.g., De Officiis 1.6) – I inclined toward the Stoic version of what you refer to as virtue ethics. In a sense, then, Mr. Bates has convicted a hammer of being a poor chair. Guilty as charged, I suppose!

Mr. Bates gleefully cites Epicurus against my philosophy: “Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering,” aiming the charge at my philosophy. But the quote is question-begging: it assumes that relief of suffering is the sole measure of philosophy, which it clearly isn’t. Moreover, on closer inspection, it is false to the case, since rash assent, which I am counseling people to avoid, turns out to be a principal cause of human misery. Accordingly, my De Divinatione ends by demanding that superstition be torn out by the roots (2.72), which would relieve suffering at a civic scale not by consolation but by refusing assent to nonsense.

Our Pyrrhonist friend accuses me of a number of specific things in his diatribe: incoherence, the alleged emptiness of the pithanon criterion, what we might call the vanity of provisionality, the fact that not even my friend Massimo declares himself a Skeptic, and finally the charge that my character and reputation are pretty bad. Let’s examine each of these charges in turn.

First, the notion that Academic Skepticism is incoherent because it is self-refuting, I raised the question myself in my Academica and answered it then and there (2.34): the Academic does not assert “nothing can be known” as dogma. Rather, he reports what strikes him as persuasive, and applies the criterion reflexively.

To put it otherwise, Mr. Bates conflates two claims: (a) there is no truth, and (b) there is no criterion of the Stoic kind, no impression that certifies its own veracity (the so-called katalēpsis). We deny only the existence of kataleptic impressions. Truth may exist in abundance, for all we know, what we lack is a self-authenticating mark of it. The two positions are not in tension, let alone incoherent.

To make things more interesting, the charge falls with equal or greater force on Pyrrhonism. Sextus Empiricus and his ilk utter phrases like “no more this than that,” “I determine nothing,” “everything is undetermined,” “to every argument an equal argument is opposed.” Each invites the same argument Mr. Bates aims at the Academy: if nothing is determined, is that determined? If every argument has an equal opposite, does that apply to itself? A Pyrrhonist pursuing this objection is sawing the branch beneath himself.

Second, let’s get back to the pithanon, the criterion for assessing impressions proposed by Carneades. As I said before, Mr. Bates is right when he points out that this cannot be interpreted in terms of the modern concept of probability, despite my own choice of the word probabilis to translate it into Latin. But from “not statistical” it doesn’t follow, as the Pyrrhonist seems to think, “merely persuasive-sounding.”

Carneades – according to Sextus Empiricus, our major source for this – proposed a graded scale whereby an impression can strike us as apparently true (the lowest grade), convincingly true, “undiverted” (meaning, coherent with everything else we know about the matter), or thoroughly explored (the closest we can come to secure judgment, or what a modern would recognize as a well-tested scientific result). This is a procedure of cross-checking our judgments against the evidence, not just a rhetorical flourish. Each rung is a mechanism for catching the errors of the rung below, and the graded scale represents a major step forward in the history of epistemology.

What Carneades and other members of the New Academy proposed was an embryonic version of what modern epistemologists call fallibilism, an approach that takes for granted that one could be wrong and yet establishes a sliding empirical criterion (the pithanon) to use as a guide to arrive at the best possible judgment given any particular set of circumstances.

Mr. Bates also complains that to say that Carneades essentially proposed a non-quantitative version of what later became known as Bayesianism doesn’t help the Academic Skeptic’s case because Bayesian priors (the starting point for that method of analysis) are subjective. But this isn’t much of an objection for two reasons: (i) the merits of a proposal can only be assessed against the merits of alternative proposals, and here the Pyrrhonist has nothing at all to offer; and (ii) many contemporary philosophers of science agree that probabilities (of which priors are an instance) are inescapably subjective, because they are best understood as an estimate of the strength of our beliefs given the available evidence. In other words, as the saying goes, this is a feature, not a bug.

As an alternative to such a rigorous and reasonable approach the Pyrrhonist fallback – appearances, custom, laws, the arts – hands the criterion to local convention. Which of the two philosophies do you think is better fitted to flattering power, another one of Mr. Bates’s complaints?

The third charge put forth against me is that provisionality of judgment as advocated by the New Academy is kayfabe. Here I venture to say that the psychological claim proves too much. Confirmation bias, brought up by Mr. Bates, afflicts every epistemology equally, Pyrrhonism included: the man who congratulates himself on his ataraxia is not obviously less vain than the man who congratulates himself on the provisionality of his judgments.

Mr. Bates mentions the research of Philip Tetlock, who showed that people who are good at holding their opinions in check are rare. But this cuts the other way from what is intended: calibration, updating, and the deliberate entertaining of opposing views are the Academic method operationalized, and Tetlock research shows that the disposition is trainable, which means we should all learn from the Academics and improve our ability to suspend judgment when it is truly warranted.

The Academic never relied on individual virtue, but rather on arguing both sides, out loud, before opponents. That is an institution, not a self-report, and its descendants are the courtroom, the dialogue, peer review, and the controlled experiment. Modern science has been defined as a kind of organized skepticism, but not of the Pyrrhonian kind!

The fourth charge is meant to be ironic, though not in the sense Mr. Bates seems to think. He says that even my student, Massimo, who wrote a whole book about my philosophy and life, refuses to consider himself a Skeptic in the Academic sense and merely says that he is a skeptical Stoic.

This is a non sequitur, and the essay’s neatest self-inflicted wound. That’s because Academic Skepticism is a stance and not a sect, so “skeptical Stoic” is not apostasy, it’s the intended use! Mr. Bates has offered Massimo’s position as evidence against the thesis when it is in fact the thesis’s best illustration.

Finally, let me address the attempt at character assassination, which at least is not a real murder, like the one perpetrated by Mark Antony against yours truly!

Bates uses ad hominem (notoriously, a logical fallacy) to prop up his hasty generalization (another fallacy!), all on the basis of a sample size of one: since Cicero, he claims, had a corrupt character, it follows that Academic Skepticism is a bad philosophy. Just imagine using the same argument with any other philosophy or religion and you’ll immediately see the problem.

But what is Mr. Bates’s evidence that I’m such a despicable individual? He quotes Plutarch’s biography of me, a source writing a century and a half century. Still, Plutarch was right that I had a penchant for self-promotion, and indeed I openly admitted so to my friends, it’s part of the public record. This was indeed one of my character flaws, perhaps excused in part by the fact that as an outsider to the Roman aristocracy I had to constantly remind my colleagues in the Senate that my contributions to the commonwealth were worth paying attention to. But by the end of his comparison of my life with that of the Greek orator Demosthenes, Plutarch himself rates me as more incorruptible than my fellow orator.

Yes, as Mr. Bates says, on the basis of Plutarch’s writings, I went to Delphi, and yes, I asked how to become most illustrious. I was twenty-three, and I will not pretend otherwise. What the Pyrrhonist omits is the answer I received, which was not a recipe for fame but a rebuke of the question: follow your own nature rather than the opinion of the multitude. Which I did, throughout my life. Do you ask for an example? Early on in my career I defended a client against a favorite of the dictator Sulla, thus risking my life for the pursuit of justice. Hardly the doings of someone who puts fame ahead of everything, don’t you think?

Furthermore, when I famously said “cedant arma togae,” let arms yield to the toga, Mr. Bates reads vanity where the line states a constitutional principle: civil authority over military. I’d like to remind you that I was proscribed and killed for holding it.

The Pyrrhonist also quotes my De Officiis 1.148, on the Cynics: “Indeed the reasoning of the Cynics must be rejected absolutely; for it is inimical to a sense of shame, without which nothing can be upright, nothing honorable.” But the rejection is of shamelessness, not of their critique of vanity, which I actually endorse where I say that love of glory is a danger (De Officiis, 1.68).

Another passage excerpted by Mr. Bates is found in my Pro Sestio (10.23) where I appear to endorse the pursuit of fame and status for their own sake. But the bit in question comes from a forensic speech, where I was clearly ventriloquizing an enemy. He errs badly who takes the opinions in our court speeches for our settled convictions. To cite prosecution rhetoric as philosophical doctrine is the very rhetorical trick the essay claims to deplore.

Yet another passage is then brought up, from Tusculans 1.17, which reads: “By Hercules, I prefer to be wrong with Plato, whom I know how much you esteem, and whom I admire myself, from what you say of him, than to be right with those others.” To which I replied: “I commend you; for, indeed, I could myself willingly be mistaken in his company.” But the context was a discussion of the soul’s immortality, where my utterance was meant as a courtesy, which is proven by the fact that afterwards I examine the question at length from both sides. Next time, read the next twenty sections, don’t stop at whatever fits your prejudices and call it a day.

There is also, if I may, a clear and decisive counterexample to Mr. Bates’s portrait of my character, in the Somnium Scipionis, which is found in the sixth book of my De Re Publica. It has been regarded as the most powerful ancient deflation of earthly glory – fame as a speck, on a speck, in a moment – written by the man Mr. Bates says organized his life around fame.

And in my speech Pro Archia (26) you will find my own open admission that we are all drawn by love of praise, but candor about the passion is evidence of self-examination, not of concealment.

At any rate, even were the portrait that Mr. Bates paints of me accurate, one vain adherent damns a method no more than Epicurus’s birthday cult damns hedonism or the Garden’s reverence for the Master damns ataraxia.

So far I have readily conceded what Mr. Bates gets right and I have then rebutted, I think convincingly, all his major points. Let me close by putting forth a positive case for the New Academy.

What the stance actually delivers is summarized in my De Natura Deorum, where I write: “Those who desire my own private opinion on every particular subject have more curiosity than is necessary. For the force of reason in disputation is to be sought after rather than authority, since the authority of the teacher is often a disadvantage to those who are willing to learn; as they refuse to use their own judgment, and rely implicitly on him whom they make choice of for a preceptor.” (1.5) In other words, weigh reasons, not authorities. Does that sound “dogmatic” to you? Is this not an anti-ego principle, the opposite of what is alleged?

Mr. Bates claims that Academic Skepticism is neglected as a philosophy of life. But such neglect should not be confused with irrelevance; its lineage is impressive: Augustine argued with it, Montaigne and Gassendi revived it, Hume inherited it, and modern fallibilism (and therefore science at large) is its grandchild.

Again, Mr. Bates is right when he says that our approach does not lead to tranquillity, but a philosophy that makes calm the highest good must trade truth for calm whenever they conflict. The Academic accepts discomfort as the price of not deceiving himself.

Also notice that the essay that so harshly criticizes me and my fellow Academicians itself assembles evidence, weighs persuasiveness, argues one side against another, and closes with a provisional prediction. Not one judgment in it is suspended. Mr. Bates cannot even attack the Academy without borrowing its instruments – which is, at last, the strongest evidence available for their usefulness.

Welcome to another episode of Ars Vivendi, our occasional series of video conversations on the art of living where I talk to authors who have written about philosophy as a way of life.

This installment features classicist Michael Fontaine — who has already been a guest at Ars Vivendi — talking about his book, How to Have Willpower, published by Princeton University Press as part of their ongoing series, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers.

How to Have Willpower brings together two profound ancient meditations on how to overcome pressures that encourage us to act against our own best interests — Plutarch’s essay On Dysopia or How to Resist Pressure and Prudentius’s poetic allegory Psychomachia or How to Slay Your Demons. Challenging the idea that humans are helpless victims of vice, these works emphasize the power of personal choice and the possibility of personal growth, as they offer insights and practical advice about resisting temptation.

In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying “yes” against our better judgment. And in a delightfully different work, Prudentius, a Latin Christian poet, dramatizes the necessity to actively fight temptation through the story of an epic battle within the human soul between fierce warrior women representing our virtues and vices.

Plutarch and Prudentius insist that we allow pressure or temptations to get the best of us. But they also agree that we can do something about it. And their wisdom can help.

Here is my conversation with Michael:

There is a reassuring little argument that surfaces whenever a skeptic complains about pseudoscience, and it goes like this: “lighten up.” So your aunt reads her horoscope over breakfast, your neighbor keeps a bowl of amethyst on the windowsill to “cleanse the energy,” and a surprising number of otherwise sensible people will not schedule surgery during a Mercury retrograde. Where’s the harm? Nobody’s forcing you to join in. Life is hard and strange, let people have their little comforts.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this attitude. While it is true that much private, low-stakes pseudoscience is fairly harmless, there’s also mounting evidence that accepting beliefs without warrant reduces critical thinking and makes one more inclined to believe further nonsense. But even if we grant the harmlessness hypothesis, the argument has a hidden premise: that pseudoscience remains private and voluntary. Change those two variables, make it public and make it coercive, and the comfortable little horoscope grows teeth. Unfortunately, the historical record on this point is not ambiguous: it is a mass grave.

Before we proceed, a few words about definitions, because the word “pseudoscience” gets thrown around as a generic insult and deserves better. Pseudoscience is not simply “science that turned out to be wrong.” Being wrong is the ordinary condition of science and indeed error, honestly acknowledged and corrected, is the very engine of the whole enterprise. Nor is pseudoscience merely “stuff I find implausible.” The distinction I have defended at length elsewhere is that pseudoscience is a body of claims that borrows the costume of science, the vocabulary, the confident tone, the gestures toward data and studies, while at the same time lacking its substance: genuine responsiveness to evidence, openness to disconfirmation, and the machinery of self-correction.

There is no single litmus test that cleanly separates the two. Philosopher of science Larry Laudan infamously declared the “demarcation problem” dead back in 1983, and he had a point against the old dream of finding a single necessary-and-sufficient criterion (Popper’s falsifiability, say). Things are just not that simple in the real world. But the better response, which some colleagues and I have argued, is that demarcation survives as a cluster concept, a family resemblance. Pseudoscience characteristically cherry-picks confirming cases, insulates its core claims from refutation with endless ad hoc rescues, mistakes the accumulation of anomalies for the persecution of heretics, and treats the scientific consensus not as a provisional best estimate but as a conspiracy to be exposed. Not one of these is decisive, but together they form a recognizable syndrome.

In this essay I wish to explore what happens when pseudoscience gets power, specifically the power of governments. Unfortunately, as soon as we start talking about politics most people immediately confuse it with partisanship. They are not at all the same thing. Indeed, it is precisely because I wish to positively engage in politics (i.e., the improvement of our polis) that I will draw examples from the entirety of the political spectrum, to show that pseudoscientific nonsense is dangerous no matter what the source.

The key point to keep in mind for what follows, then, is that what makes a claim pseudoscientific is structural, how it relates to evidence, not political.

The graveyards of the twentieth century

For once, let’s skip the deep past: the alchemists and astrologers of antiquity operated without CDCs and five-year plans, and the state was rarely in a position to enforce their errors on millions. The more instructive cases are recent, and they are horrifying precisely because they are modern, bureaucratic, and equipped with the full apparatus of the state.

Lysenkoism is arguably the canonical example, and note well: it was a phenomenon of the left. Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist with a peasant’s touch and a demagogue’s instincts, rejected Mendelian genetics as “bourgeois” and “idealist,” insisting instead that acquired characteristics could be inherited and that crops could be trained, almost re-educated, to thrive. This was not merely a bad theory, it was a bad theory with Stalin’s seal of approval on it. During Lysenko’s ascendancy, genetics was banned as a discipline in the Soviet Union. Nikolai Vavilov, one of the great botanists of the century, was arrested and died in prison of starvation, an irony too bitter to be fiction. Soviet and later Chinese agriculture, reorganized around Lysenko’s fantasies of close planting and deep plowing, contributed materially to famines. When Mao imported the doctrine during the Great Leap Forward, the resulting agricultural catastrophe killed tens of millions. That is what a pseudoscientific theory costs when it is protected not by evidence but by power.

Nazi science supplies an example from the other end of the political spectrum, lest anyone imagine this is a communist specialty. The regime denounced relativity and quantum mechanics as “Jewish physics” and promoted a nationalist Deutsche Physik in their place, driving out precisely the talent (Einstein among them) that might have won them the war. Himmler was an enthusiast of the World Ice Theory, a cosmological crank doctrine holding that the universe was essentially made of ice. And of course the deadliest pseudoscience of the century was Nazi race “science,” a vast pseudo-biological edifice of measurements and typologies that provided the intellectual architecture for genocide.

Read more

This is an ongoing series on Epictetus’s Discourses, a book that literally changed my life and that, I think, is grossly underestimated nowadays, despite Epictetus’s major influence throughout the Middle Ages up to the Enlightenment and the founding of the American republic. Read what follows with an eye to its practical applications, the Master would have thrown you out of his school if he thought you were doing philosophy as a purely theoretical exercise! In these essays I’m using Robin Waterfield’s annotated translation. Two good public domain versions are collected in the Delphi Classics edition. Previous entries can be found by consulting the Figs in Winter Index.

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One of the problems with practicing philosophy is that people tend to expect the wrong thing from the practice. We constantly hear of nonsense along the lines of “do Stoicism to be a winner” or “to become rich,” or “to become famous.” As if any of the above were the actual goals of Stoic philosophy. Even more modest achievements, like developing a lasting happy relationship with your partner, or getting on a satisfying career path, are outside of the scope. Which is why when some of my students’ parents ask how much money their daughters and sons will make if they major in philosophy I have to explain to them that that’s precisely the wrong question.

One day someone with a similarly misguided, yet sincere attitude, approached the Master:

“[He] asked Epictetus to tell him how he could get his brother to stop being angry with him, [to which Epictetus] said, ‘Philosophy doesn’t promise to help anyone get anything external.’

‘What about my brother’s life, then?’

‘Again, that’s the material for his art of living, but as far as your art of living is concerned, it’s an external, like farmland, health, and popularity.’” (Discourses 1.15.1-3)

Epictetus always insisted that the fundamental rule of his philosophy is that some things are up to us and others are not up to us, and that a smooth life follows from focusing our attention on the first category while at the same time developing an attitude of equanimity toward the second one.

Your brother’s anger is up to him, not to you, therefore – says the Master – you should treat it accordingly, as an external, akin to things like property, health, and fame.

What, then, is up to us?

“‘Under all circumstances, I shall keep the command center aligned with nature.’ Whose command center? ‘That of the individual in whom I am to be found.’” (1.15.4)

The “command center” is what Marcus Aurelius calls the hegemonikon, the seat of the most crucial human faculty: prohairesis, the faculty of judgment. While the ancient Stoics were mistaken in thinking (together with Plato and Aristotle) that the hegemonikon is located in the heart (Galen, Marcus’s personal physician, harshly corrected them), they were right that there is such thing as a command center of our conscious faculties. It’s what modern neuroscientists call the executive functions of the brain.

These functions are more or less located in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), specifically its dorsolateral portion (dlPFC), which is the outermost part of the frontal lobes, roughly behind the forehead. It’s the most recently evolved and most extensively expanded region in humans relative to other primates.

It’s core functions include: working memory, that is, holding and manipulating information in the mind; cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift between tasks or mental sets; inhibitory control, which allows us to suppress impulsive or automatic responses; planning and goal-setting, making it possible to sequence actions toward a future outcome; decision-making, meaning weighing options, especially under uncertainty; and attention regulation, the capacity to direct and sustain focus.

The dlPFC doesn’t work alone, it coordinates closely with the anterior cingulate cortex (conflict monitoring, error detection) and the orbitofrontal/ventromedial PFC (emotional regulation, value-based decisions). Damage in this area, as in the classic case of Phineas Gage, tends to spare IQ and memory but devastates planning, impulse control, and social judgment, which is part of why the executive functions are treated as a distinct cognitive domain rather than just “general intelligence.”

The last function listed, attention regulation, is what Epictetus calls prosoche, often rendered as Stoic mindfulness, and he and Seneca say that nothing ever got improved by not paying attention to it, so prosoche is a particularly important aspect of the hegemonikon.

From the brief description of the modern neuroscience of the executive functions we can see just how good the ancient Stoics’ intuitions were in these matters, and also why Epictetus thought that taking care of one’s prohairesis amounts to taking care of oneself: the two are one and the same.

Notice also that equating the self with the executive functions of the brain does not make Stoic psychology essentialist, since the dlPFC is a constantly changing structure, updating itself as a result of our experiences (external inputs) and (internally driven) evaluations of such experiences. It should also make clear why it is unfair to accuse the Stoics of dualism: they were not making some kind of fundamental ontological distinction between body and mind. They, rather sensibly, saw that a relatively small part of our anatomy accounts for all our conscious decisions, the ones for which we can reasonably be held accountable. And that’s why, in an important sense, we are our prohairesis.

[Just ask yourself the following question: if you were given a choice between losing your mind and losing a leg, or an eye, which one would you choose? Why?]

Epictetus’s student, however, still wasn’t entirely convinced:

“‘So how am I to stop him being angry with me?’

‘Bring him here and l’ll talk to him, but I’ve nothing to say to you about his anger.’” (1.15.5)

While someone else’s anger is not up to us – neither to the student nor, of course, to Epictetus himself – it is very much up to us to talk to people and try to reason with them. Since the Master is more practiced than the student in this, Epictetus is basically saying, bring your brother to me and I’ll do my best. He also reminds the student that good things take time, and one should not be in a hurry to get results:

“‘Anything of any importance takes time,’ said Epictetus, ‘even a bunch of grapes or a fig. If what you were telling me now was ‘I want a fig,’ I’d reply ‘Be patient. First let the tree flower and then fruit and then wait for the fruit to ripen.’ So given that it takes time for even a fig tree’s fruit to mature, and it doesn’t happen overnight, are you wanting to get the fruit of human intelligence so quickly and easily?” (1.15.7-8)

I’ll try to remember these words the next time I find myself inclined to get impatient with one of my own students, imagining him in my mind as a yet unripened fig, which – given time, patience, and nurturing – might just become ripe and delicious to the world.

Figs in Winter now has several hundred articles on a wide range of topics, including various approaches to living a meaningful life (ethics), examinations of pseudoscientific claims (science), and essays on practical reasoning (logic). This occasional series is meant to remind my readers of some of this material for their enjoyment and use.

Why Epicureans and Utilitarians are wrong: on the axiology of pain and pleasure. Hedonism, philosophically speaking, is “the ethical theory that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life.” (Apple Dictionary) Two major clusters of hedonistic theories appeared in the history of western philosophy: the Cyrenaics and Epicureans of Hellenistic times, and the Utilitarians of the 19th to the 21st centuries.

Cyrenaicism was a short-lived school established by Aristippus of Cyrene (modern Libya, north Africa) who was born around 435 BCE and was, interestingly, a student of Socrates—himself certainly not an hedonist. The Cyrenaics believed that the good life consists in experiencing physical pleasures in the present, largely rejecting both intellectual pleasures (because they are less intense) and pleasures that were from the past (enjoyed merely by remembering them) or the future (not here yet, and may never come). Not surprisingly, they also believed that pain is the only evil. … (17 May 2024)

Stoicism as a subversive activity. Is Stoicism a conservative or progressive philosophy of life? To a first approximation, the very question makes no sense. “Conservative” and “progressive” are modern, culturally and temporally specific labels for certain ways of seeing and acting in the world. Nevertheless, it does make sense to ask whether practicing Stoicism leads one to simply embrace the status quo or to consciously attempt to subvert it. Or, perhaps, neither.

Some Greco-Roman philosophies do, I think, inherently favor the status quo. Epicureanism teaches us to disengage from social and political life on the eminently sensible assumption that it is more likely to cause us pain rather than pleasure, and since a life of tranquillity characterized by lack of pain is the goal of the Epicureans, this makes sense. … (24 May 2024)

The problem of the perverse. One of the most powerful ideas of Stoic philosophy is that we are naturally “virtuous,” by which the Stoics meant that Nature endows us with the ability to reason and an innate tendency to act prosocially. And virtue—according to Seneca—is nothing but “right” reason, meaning reason applied to the betterment of social living (Letter 66.32).

If this is so, then we are faced with what is sometimes referred to as the problem of the perverse: on the one hand, Nature gave us virtue; on the other hand, most of us behave unvirtuously (i.e., either irrationally or antisocially) at least some of the times, if not most of them. What gives?

Before we seek an answer to the problem, let’s make sure the premise is right: are we really naturally virtuous in the way the Stoics assumed? I think so, though not because of the reasons they adduced. … (31 May 2024)

On the worth of comedy and tragedy. We tend to think of Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher-king, and in a sense he was, though the ancient Romans were allergic to the word “king” and preferred Imperator, which technically just meant supreme commander of the troops, the equivalent of a modern American President being hailed as “commander-in-chief.”

Emperors ever since the first one, Octavian Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, also liked to present themselves as “princeps,” which literally meant, somewhat oxymoronically, “first among equals.” As an added bonus, both “imperator” and “princeps” were terms that arched back to the time of the Roman Republic, which many still considered to have embodied the ideal form for a State. … (7 June 2024)

On the Stoic God (or absence thereof). I consider myself a Stoic practitioner, with more than a pinch of Skepticism added to my philosophy of life. Yet, I just finished reading a book that basically tells me that unless I believe in the ancient Stoic God I’m not really a Stoic, but rather someone who just uses Stoic-inspired life hackery to muddle through existence.

So let’s settle this matter once and for all, shall we? Just kidding. Of course we will never settle this sort of things, because people will believe whatever they will believe, and they will provide what they think are good reasons to back up such beliefs. And I am, needless to say, no exception to the rule. … (21 June 2024)

[Based on How to Travel: An Ancient Guide for the Modern Tourist, translated by Mark D. Usher. Full book series here.]

Traveling is arguably one of the oldest human activities. After all, that’s how we got out of Africa, our evolutionary cradle, and colonized the rest of the planet – for good or for ill. We live in an unprecedented era of travel: thanks to modern technology I have just returned to New York from a trip to Turin, in northwestern Italy, during which I managed also to visit the beautiful city of Verona, on the east side of the country. And then there’s virtual travel, a perhaps less satisfying but more affordable and safe type of adventure that allows us to visit the remotest places on our planet, or even get to the Moon or Mars.

How to Travel, a collection of excerpts from ancient Greco-Roman texts, is a marvel in its own right, thanks to the varied and intriguing choices made by the translator, Mark D. Usher, whom I last interviewed about Cynicism back in 2024. The goal is “to reinsert some sanity and solidity into our experience of travel,” which these days can feel a bit too predictable, canned, and commodified.

At its best, traveling isn’t about collecting an endless series of Instagram moments, but about curiosity toward how other people live and what places that are different from our home look like and feel. It’s about broadening our experience and therefore – if we’re paying attention – our minds. Usher invites us to consider that one of the major authors appearing in his collection is the historian Herodotus, whom Cicero called the father of history (though Plutarch, a bit less positively, referred to him as the father of lies…). The very word, “history,” means inquiry, and that is – at its best – what Herodotus was attempting to do: to inquire into people’s customs and motives, so as to better understand humanity itself.

While the stated goal of Herodotus’s Histories is to help explain the enmity between the Greeks and the Persians, he also says that he wants “to ensure that human achievements not be lost to time and that the wondrously magnificent accomplishments of Greeks and non-Greeks alike not go uncelebrated.”

Usher presents us two essays by Herodotus, one about pharaonic Egypt, the other about the Scythians. The two couldn’t possibly be further apart: Egypt was an ancient, sedentary, and regimented place, while the Scythians were nomads and, Usher reminds us, alarmingly violent. The contrast between the two peoples is at the same time enlightening and troublesome, and still very good food for thought for a modern mind.

A completely different essay is the one by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who explains to his friend Lucilius why travel is no panacea to solve one’s problems. The reason is that we tend to forget that we travel carrying with us the very source of our troubles: ourselves. What we need is to work on our issues, regardless of where we happen to be, and only then we will be able to truly enjoy hopping from place to place.

We are then treated to a piece by the Roman historian Tacitus, based on a now lost book by Pliny the Elder, which praises the Germans, the northern neighbors of Rome. The Nazis misunderstood this source, conveniently taking out of context phrases like “[the Germans] are like no other ethnicity but themselves, unique and pure.” Usher points out that Tacitus’s goal was actually to contrast Germans and Romans in order to chastise the latter for what he saw as their increasingly decadent customs. It may help to remember that Tacitus lived through the reign of terror instituted by the emperor Domitian (the same one who expelled the Stoic Epictetus from Italy), an experience that triggered a lasting hatred of tyranny in the historian, though he managed to survive and thrive through three of the five good emperors: Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian.

A fascinating, possibly forged, tale is the one told by Hanno and entitled Periplus, which describes a voyage outside the Mediterranean and into the African side of the Atlantic, with the explicit purpose of forcefully colonizing new lands. Usher calls it “an object lesson in how not to travel,” and for good reasons. Nevertheless, he says that few scholars doubt that the voyage really happened, regardless of whether this particular account of it is original or, perhaps, a Greek copy of an earlier Punic text.

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I am an atheist and a Stoic. Nevertheless, I also seek convergence with other philosophical traditions, and even religions, whenever I think we can work together. So I recently read the much publicized encyclical on artificial intelligence written by Pope Leo XIV, in order to aid my own thinking on the complex ethics of AI as well as to see just how much I might agree with someone who, though he belongs to a tradition I left when I was a teenager, seems like a very reasonable and compassionate human being.

What I intend to do in what follows is: (i) summarize the basic arguments of Leo’s encyclical; (ii) highlight where, once we strip away all the (in my mind unnecessary) religious language, I can wholeheartedly agree with the Pope; and (iii) comment on the parts where, even with the best of intentions, I need to part ways with him.

Leo’s central claims

Leo’s core move in Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) is to refuse the simplistic framing “should we accept or reject AI?” on the grounds that it is a category error. Technology is not, in itself, good or evil, he argues, but it is also never neutral in practice, because every system inherits the priorities of those who design, finance, regulate, and deploy it.

So the only meaningful question is whose values are embedded, toward what ends, and under whose control. The Pope deploys two architectural images: the tower (of Babel), built for self-aggrandizement, power, and homogenization, versus the city (of Jerusalem) rebuilt collaboratively, piece by piece, with shared responsibility. Such images are just a vivid way of contrasting technology that concentrates power and flattens human difference against technology that distributes agency and serves a genuinely shared good. Strip the Biblical scaffolding and you get a fairly standard (and strong) claim from the philosophy of technology: artifacts encode politics, and the politics here are trending toward unaccountable concentration.

Leo then supports his main contention with a number of arguments, which I am going to briefly summarize in a secularized fashion:

Power has migrated from states to private actors. Innovation used to be steered largely by governments, but it’s now driven by transnational firms whose resources exceed those of many states. This makes technological power harder to scrutinize or direct toward collective ends, leading to the assertion of a private power with public consequences and little democratic accountability.

AI is a tool, not a mind. Artificial intelligence imitates functions of human cognition and often beats us on speed and scale, but it has no experience, embodiment, or moral conscience, and it doesn’t understand what it produces. Leo makes a nice empirical point: these systems are “cultivated more than built,” in the sense that even their designers don’t understand their internal representations. The normative consequence is that moral judgment cannot be delegated to a calculation.

The artifact itself is not morally neutral. A system embeds choices through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and through how it classifies people. So ethics can’t stop at “are we using it well?,” it also has to interrogate the design and the implicit model of the person baked into the data and the objective function.

Responsibility must stay traceable. Opaque automated decisions about employment, credit, services, and reputation diffuse accountability, no one “accounts for” the judgment and it’s easy instead to blame the machine. Leo rightly wants identifiable chains of responsibility, contestability, and redress, and is willing to say that prudence sometimes means slowing down. This is not an anti-progress position, it’s responsible care.

Concentration and “new monopolies.” AI, according to the Pope, amplifies whoever already holds capital, data, and expertise. But data, arguably, is a collective product and shouldn’t be treated as private property to be sold off. Leo therefore gestures toward managing it as a common or shared good.

“Alignment” is necessary but not sufficient. Moralizing the machine is empty if the morality is set by a handful of unaccountable actors and their ethics becomes an “invisible infrastructure.” The ethical frameworks themselves must be openly contestable and subject to shared (political, not merely technical) standards. Hence the notion of “disarming” AI: freeing it from arms-race logic – military, but also economic and cognitive (i.e., the race for ever-larger models and datasets to secure dominance) – and rejecting the assumption that technical power confers the right to govern.

The transhumanist/posthumanist critique. The real issue – again according to Leo – isn’t enhancement per se but the underlying anthropology: if the human is something to be optimized or surpassed, it becomes easier to treat some lives as less worthy and to justify “necessary sacrifices” borne by the vulnerable. Against this, the Pope defends finitude – limitation, error, vulnerability, even suffering – as constitutive of a meaningful life rather than mere defects to be engineered away. His epigram “having more without being more” carries the whole argument.

Truth as a common good. Disinformation predates AI but is now massively amplified. Truth has both a rational dimension (verification, sourcing, argument) and a relational one (trust). Democracy depends on a shared “concordance with the facts” and indifference to truth corrodes it. Here Leo leans on Hannah Arendt’s point that the ideal subject of totalitarianism is the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction has collapsed.

Education, work, freedom. AI’s frictionless answers erode the patience that genuine inquiry and judgment require, and risk de-skilling thought. Leo refers to Plato’s famous Seventh Letter, arguing that the deepest things “are learned only after much time and effort, by engaging in discussion with others, striking upon ideas and experiences together like flint until the spark of understanding is kindled within us.” Morevoer, work is not merely income but identity, relationship, and contribution and automation can de-skill, surveil, and subordinate workers to machine pace. The Pope wants social criteria attached to innovation (like retraining, participation, dignity-of-work as a success metric), and warns against the attention economy engineered to exploit vulnerability and against algorithmic social control via mass profiling.

Hidden labor and the “new slavery.” The supply chain behind frictionless AI includes data labelers and content moderators (often poorly paid, frequently women), mineral extraction (sometimes by children), and trafficking conducted through the same digital infrastructure. Leo extends talks of “data colonialism,” the extraction of health, genetic, and demographic data from structurally weak regions of the world. The demand here concerns supply-chain transparency and due diligence.

War and autonomous systems. AI lowers the threshold for force, makes killing impersonal, and reduces victims to data. Leo articulates a number of criteria to counter this trend: traceable responsibility; the imposition of a “moral timeframe” (i.e., speed must not drive irreversible decisions); strict combatant/non-combatant distinction; and a hard line that lethal or irreversible decisions cannot be delegated to opaque automated processes as meaningful human control is non-negotiable. Interestingly, the Pope declares the “just war” framework too easily abused to remain useful, and calls for international constraints on the arms race, a revival of diplomacy, and a realism that is neither idealist (selecting facts to fit a worldview) nor cynical (assuming that force always prevails).

Overall, Leo’s undergirding principles, expressed in secular form, amount to the following:

(i) Persons have worth not reducible to their productivity or output;

(ii) We need to think in terms of a common good that is more than the sum of private interests;

(iii) Resources, now including data and infrastructure, are to be shared by all rather than monopolized;

(iv) Subsidiarity: decisions need to be made as close as possible to those affected, with higher powers supporting rather than supplanting the process;

(v) Solidarity as interdependence ought to be consciously chosen;

(vi) Justice is to be pursued at the structural, not merely individual, level.

Where I agree

None of the six principles above is distinctively Catholic. That is the striking thing. When I read them stripped of their scriptural dress, I kept recognizing conclusions I had arrived at from an entirely different starting point, and not by coincidence. Here is where a Stoic atheist finds himself nodding along with the Bishop of Rome.

I suspect that most serious ethical traditions – including virtue ethical ones – would land near the above regardless of foundation. And I think this holds for the load-bearing claims. Let us briefly review:

Leo says almost verbatim that persons are ends, not means, and this is, of course, Kant’s famous formula of the categorical imperative. The dignity-vs-price distinction does the same work in Kant that “ontological dignity” does for Leo, minus the Christian metaphysics.

“Having more without being more” is nearly Senecan, and the Stoic indifference to externals gives us an independent route to the same critique of the optimization mindset. Worth is not earned by efficiency.

Judgment, says Leo, can’t be outsourced. The Stoic prohairesis, that the faculty of assent and choice, is what’s “up to us” and it maps directly onto the Pope’s insistence that conscience and freedom must guide the tools, not be displaced by them.

Leo’s encyclical is also clearly cosmopolitan in scope. Analogously, Stoic oikeiôsis extended to all of humanity arrives at the same result as his “common good” and “solidarity,” without needing a creator God.

The Stoic acceptance of mortality and necessity gives us a non-theological version of Leo’s case against transhumanism: a life without limit is not a fuller human life but a different (and arguably impoverished) thing.

Finally, the Pope quotes Tolkien: “do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set” thereby reminding his readers of an essentially Stoic role-ethics whereby each of us is ethically bound to play our several roles in life to the best of our abilities.

What unites these points of contact is that none of them needs God to do its work. Kant’s persons-as-ends, Seneca’s indifference to externals, Epictetus’s prohairesis, the cosmopolitan reach of oikeiôsis – each gives me an independent road to Leo’s conclusions. Which raises the obvious question of where those roads finally fork.

Where I honestly disagree

All of the above said, there are a few passages in Magnifica Humanitas that are distinctively Catholic and will not survive into Stoic or broadly secular ethics. The roads fork in three places, and it is worth being honest about each.

There is a right-to-life passage (§55: abortion and euthanasia as “gravely wrong”) that is doctrinally specific. A Stoic, who could regard a rational exit from life as licit (e.g., Epictetus’s concept of the “open door”) would here diverge outright, as do most secular ethicists.

Also, grounding dignity as infinite in virtue of infinite divine love (§53) is irreducibly theological. The secular versions ground dignity in rational agency, sentience, or the capacity for relationship, and a thoroughgoing naturalist will treat dignity as a normative posit we have good reasons to adopt, not a metaphysical given. That’s a difference in foundation even where the conclusion coincides, but it is this coincidence that I think is ultimately of utmost interest.

Finally, Leo says that the family is “founded on the enduring union between a man and a woman” (§165), which is a conservative commitment doing no real work in the AI argument and convergent traditions don’t need it.

Notice the shape of what has emerged. The divergences, when they come, are not about AI at all: they are about abortion, the metaphysics of dignity, and the definition of the family. On the actual subject of the encyclical, the disagreement is essentially nil.

So we have an interesting situation where different traditions converge robustly on the conclusions and on mid-level principles like non-instrumentalization, suspicion of unaccountable concentrated power, non-delegable moral judgment, and the value of finitude.

At the same time, though, there is a clear divergence on foundations and on a handful of bioethical specifics. This, however, may actually strengthen my suggestion that it is worthwhile to engage in the sort of exercise I presented above, since convergence-despite-different-grounds is better evidence that the conclusions track something real than mere agreement among people who already share premises.

This is not merely an academic pleasure. The ethics of AI is being written right now, and it is being written largely by the very actors whose concentrated, unaccountable power Leo and I both distrust. In that contest, the people who care about human dignity cannot afford to be fractured along sectarian lines — atheists waiting for believers to abandon their metaphysics, believers dismissing secular ethics as rootless. When a Stoic unbeliever and a Catholic pope, reasoning from incompatible first principles, arrive at the same six conclusions about what technology owes to human beings, that convergence is not a curiosity to be noted and filed away. It is a coalition waiting to be built. The tower, after all, is already under construction. If the rest of us mean to rebuild the city instead, we had better be willing to lay bricks alongside people whose blueprints, in the margins, differ from our own.

“I would prefer not to”: The mystery behind literature’s most famous act of refusal. “I would prefer not to.” Those words, printed in white capital letters on a black T-shirt, are worn by a man surrounded by crates full of books in Zuccotti Park, downtown Manhattan. It is late October 2011, and the man doesn’t know it yet, but in three weeks’ time, the books in his crates will be seized by the NYPD and destroyed.

The slogan on the man’s T-shirt comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The words are spoken by Bartleby, a lawyer’s copyist, who has become, in the words of The New Republic, the “patron saint of civil disobedience.”

In Melville’s fable, Bartleby works diligently for a New York lawyer until one day, for no discernible reason, he stops and instead responds to his employer’s every request with the phrase: “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby remains at his desk, and the lawyer’s every attempt to get him to work proves unsuccessful. Eventually, the lawyer tells Bartleby to pack up and leave the office. “I would prefer not to,” is the reply. … (Big Think)

There’s an ancient solution to our modern crisis of attention. About 2,000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca warned of a crisis of attention. The problem wasn’t caused by smartphones or TikTok; it was because papyrus had become more widely available. As a result, scrolls became plentiful and wealthy readers had access to more texts than ever before.

Seneca observed that the minds of those who read too many scrolls too quickly became restless and unsteady. This kind of mind was less able, he noted, to “stay in one place and spend time with itself.”

The lesson then was no less true than it is now, in our perpetually distracted, screen-addled, multitasking age. When we allow ideas to come and go in rapid succession, we keep our minds too busy and wear them out. Nothing sticks. “One who is everywhere is nowhere,” Seneca cautioned. … (New York Times)

Death by AI. Last year, the New York Times eulogized a dead kitty in a front-page article.

At Delirium, a dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, the décor is dark, the drinks are strong, and the emotions are raw. The punk rockers and old-school city natives here look tough, but they are in mourning.

Kit Kat used to bar-hop along the block, slinking into Delirium for company and chin rubs. Everybody knew the bodega cat, affectionately calling him the Mayor of 16th Street. Kit Kat was their “dawg,” the guys hanging out on the corner said.

But shortly before midnight on Oct. 27, the tabby was run over just outside the bar and left for dead. The culprit?

A robot taxi.

A couple of weeks later, the Times returned with a second article revisiting the community reaction and featuring a video of a Waymo taxi running over Kit Kat.

The death of Kit Kat was awful, but what’s worse are those rare cases when driverless cars kill people. Or when new technologies have other tragic consequences, as in the stories of AI “therapists” that allegedly encourage teens to commit suicide, or at least don’t work hard enough to stop them from killing themselves. Or in cases where people die due to mistaken AI-generated medical diagnoses. … (Small Potatoes)

Natural beauty: exploring Shaftesbury’s ideas on nature, virtue, and beauty. One of the most interesting (and currently under-appreciated thinkers) of the early modern period was Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1670-1713). He was so important to philosophy in the 18th century that the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment—David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith, among others—all had to grapple with Shaftesbury, either to criticize or be inspired by his work. Hume, now considered by far the greater philosopher, credited him as one of the “philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing.” Eighteenth-century German thinkers, from Leibniz to Goethe, were especially influenced by his thoughts on nature and beauty. Leibniz went so far as to call his work “beyond Plato and Descartes,” while Herder called him “the beloved Plato of Europe.” … (Stoicism for Humans by Brittany Polat)

Where do we find answers? “There is a scroll buried deep in the woods,” the sage says, “but to get there is hard.”

You’re sitting in the tavern with all your adventuring friends: Aristo the Archer, Thomas the Cleric, René the Tinker, and Bertrand the Magician. You lean in and listen closely.

“First, you must meet with the Scholarch of the Academy, and he will teach you the Geometric Path. After several years, you will set out to cross the Bridge of Contemplation and abide in thought for a time. Once you are ready, enter the woods. There are creatures within that you must defeat. The LinkedIn Gargoyle will tempt you with a career. The Incubus of Invalid Syllogisms will pretend to be your friend. And finally, hardest of all, the Dragon of Relativity will roar with the voice of a thousand peoples. Overcome all these, and you will find the scroll — the Scroll of Truth. In there, you will find the answer to everything you seek.”

For thousands of years in the Western tradition, this is how philosophers have viewed truth. It’s often called Truth with a capital T — abstracted, perfect, and pure. It’s the single correct answer and the only path, where all others lead to darkness. It’s in Plato’s World of Forms, Aquinas’s Divine Intellect, Descartes’s Meditations, and Russell’s Logical Atomism. It’s in the somewhat short-lived efforts of Leibniz and Frege to create a logical language — beyond and better than our day-to-day languages. The way we talk and live is so messy. So imprecise. … (Mini Philosophy by Jonny Thomson)

I’ve spent a good deal of time lately thinking, writing, and talking about Stoicism in its many practical guises: the dichotomy of control, the management of emotions, the ethics of relationships, the awareness of mortality. These are the themes that keep coming back, in different forms, whenever the conversation turns to what it might mean to live well. But all of that theorizing eventually has to answer to a much smaller, much more stubborn question: what does a good life actually look like, concretely, on an ordinary day like, say, today?

Because that, in the end, is what it comes down to. Every Stoic idea worth its salt is not a theory to contemplate but a tool to use. And the real test of any philosophy of life isn’t the treatise it produces, but the day it makes possible. To put it as Epictetus did:

“If what I prize is just the interpreting itself, haven’t I ended up as a literary critic rather than a philosopher, with the only difference being that I explicate Chrysippus rather than Homer? So when someone asks me to expound some passage of Chrysippus, I blush at my inability to show him that my actions reflect and are consistent with the words I’m reading.” (Enchiridion 50)

Let’s start with a confusion the Stoics were eager to clear up, and which remains widespread today: the idea that the good life is the same thing as the pleasant life, that is, a life free of difficulty, maximizing comfort and satisfaction.

For the Stoics, the good life, what the Greeks called eudaimonia, does not consist in the accumulation of pleasures or the absence of pain (a la Epicurus). It consists in living in accordance with our higher nature, which for the Stoics is our rational and social nature: living according to reason, in harmony with ourselves, with other human beings, and with the world at large.

This means the eudaimonic life, in the Stoic view, does not depend primarily on external circumstances. One can live well even amid hardship, loss, or illness, because what makes a life good is not what happens to us but how we respond to what happens to us, the quality of character we express, the coherence between what we hold important and what we actually do. Again, Epictetus:

“People are troubled not by things but by their judgments about things. Death, for example, isn’t frightening, or else Socrates would have thought so. No, what frightens people is their judgment about death, that it’s something to fear. So whenever we’re obstructed or troubled or distressed, let’s blame no one but ourselves – that is, our judgments.” (Enchiridion 5a)

It’s a demanding idea, and in a way a consoling one. Demanding, because it strips away the usual excuse of circumstance: we can no longer say “I’ll be happy once I get this or that,” because the good life isn’t deferred to some future condition, it’s available now, in how we choose to live. Consoling, because it means the possibility of living well is never entirely closed off to us, not even in the most adverse situations.

There’s a reason for framing this around a single day rather than a life as a whole, and the reason is deeply Stoic.

The Stoics had a particular relationship with the unit of the day. Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus return constantly to this timescale: not the whole of life, too vast and indeterminate to grasp, but the single, concrete, governable day. Seneca advised settling the accounts of one’s life every evening, as though each day were a life in miniature, with its own beginning and end. Marcus Aurelius prepared himself each morning for what the day would bring, and each evening retraced what had been. As for Epictetus:

“Let not slumber approach your weary eyes before reviewing all that you did during the day. ‘Where did I go wrong? What did I do? What duty did I leave undone?’ After this beginning, run back over your actions, and then reproach yourself for things done badly and rejoice for things done well.” (Discourses 3.10.2-3)

This anchoring to the day is not incidental, it’s the practical recognition of a truth: we don’t live “life” in the abstract, we live a succession of days. And if we don’t know how to live a single day well, the idea of “living life well” remains an empty fantasy. The good life is not some grand project to be realized at an indefinite point in the future: it is what we make of this day, and then the next, and the next after that.

There’s something liberating in this perspective. A whole life can feel crushing, too large, too freighted with expectation, too hard to “make good” in its totality. A day, by contrast, is within reach. We can decide how to meet the people we’ll encounter today, how to use the hours we have today, and how to respond to whatever happens today. A good life, in the end, is nothing more than a sufficient number of well-lived days, one after another.

Let’s try to be concrete. What, in practice, makes a day “well lived” in the Stoic spirit?

A well-lived day begins with a certain preparation: a moment, in the morning, in which we orient ourselves toward what’s coming, reminding ourselves of what matters and what lies outside our control. Not a rigid plan, but an inner disposition. [1. Morning meditation.]

It’s a day in which, faced with whatever happens, we distinguish between what depends on us and what doesn’t, and invest our energy in what is genuinely ours: our choices, actions, and responses, rather than exhausting ourselves over what we cannot control. [2. What, today, is up to me?]

It’s also a day in which, when a difficult emotion arrives, be it irritation, fear, or a sense of being wronged, we don’t react automatically, but allow ourselves that space, however small, between stimulus and response, where reason can re-enter the picture. [3. Own the space between stimulus and reaction.]

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There is a Latin word that has no satisfying translation in English, and precisely for that reason it is worth pausing on it. The word is otium.

It does not mean “idleness” in the sense we usually intend: laziness, inactivity, time wasted on the couch. In Latin, otium denotes something precise and precious: time free from public and professional obligations, dedicated to what nourishes the mind and spirit. Reading, reflection, philosophical conversation, writing, study. For Roman intellectuals, otium was not an occasional luxury but a structural necessity of the well-lived life.

Its opposite was negotium, literally, the negation of otium: business, public duties, work, social obligations. The nec-otium, that which is not rest.

Seneca returns to this distinction throughout his writings, and particularly in the Letters to Lucilius, one of the most beautiful works in Latin literature, written in the final years of his life after he had almost entirely withdrawn from Nero’s court. His position there is more nuanced and more interesting than it might initially appear.

The temptation, when reading Seneca on otium, is to interpret it as an invitation to escape: abandon the world, retreat to the country villa, close the door on obligations, and devote yourself to philosophy in peace. And indeed, in certain passages, Seneca seems to say exactly this.

But there is a specific text – the De otio (“On Leisure”) – in which his position becomes more complex. Seneca is perhaps responding here to an objection raised by more orthodox Stoics: how can you justify withdrawal from public life, if Stoicism teaches that the sage must participate actively in the community?

Seneca’s answer is elegant. He argues that there exist two republics: a small one, that of the city or state in which one is born, and a great one, that of all humanity. Even someone who withdraws from the first can continue to serve the second: through writing, thinking, and the formation of those who come after. The philosopher’s otium is not an abandonment of the world: it is a different way of being in the world and contributing to it (De otio, 4).

This distinction has an interesting modern echo. Today we might call it the contrast between reactive, visible work and deep, generative work; or between responding to immediate stimuli and producing something that lasts. Seneca was saying, in essence, that not all contribution to the world passes through direct and visible participation: some of the most important things are done in silence, alone, with unstructured time available.

We live in an era that has structurally abolished otium. Not in any legal sense – no one compels us to be connected twenty-four hours a day, yet – but in a cultural and technological sense. The devices we carry everywhere at all times have made the distinction between otium and negotium nearly impossible to maintain.

The problem, as usual, is not technology itself: it is that we have accepted, often without noticing, a conception of time in which every unproductive moment is regarded as wasted, where silence is uncomfortable and must be filled, and in which boredom – which psychologists now recognize as a valuable mental state, necessary for creativity and for the processing of experience – is treated as a problem to be immediately solved with some kind of stimulus.

Seneca would have recognized this as a particularly sophisticated form of wasting time. We are extremely busy, always occupied, our calendars full, but how much of this activity is genuine negotium, that is, necessary and meaningful work, and how much is a form of distraction dressed up as productivity, “busyness,” if you like?

The Stoic philosopher was not naive. He knew perfectly well that having free time is not enough to use it well. Low-quality otium, that is, time spent drifting without direction, constantly switching activities, seeking distractions, produces nothing of value and nourishes no one.

Seneca diagnoses this restlessness with particular sharpness in a letter on travel as a cure for discontent. There he offers a Socratic rebuke to those who have crossed vast distances and changed scene after scene without managing to shake off their gloom: why be surprised that globe-trotting hasn’t helped, when you take yourself with you wherever you go? What you need, Seneca insists, is a change of soul, not a change of climate (Letters, 28.1–2). The problem is not a lack of free time, nor the wrong location: it is the lack of an interior center from which any time, anywhere, might be inhabited with profit. Restlessness merely relocates the burden, it never sets it down.

High-quality otium, for Seneca, has some precise characteristics. It is voluntary and intentional: one chooses to be in that time, rather than finding oneself there by accident. It is oriented: there is something one wants to do, think, read, or write, even if that something produces no measurable result. And it is long enough to allow depth: fragments of time between one obligation and the next do not suffice, as the mind needs to stretch, to descend into depth, and this requires continuity.

The practical question is inevitable: how does one actually do this, in a normal life full of real commitments and genuine responsibilities?

Neither Seneca nor I have a universal recipe to offer. But a principle emerges clearly from his texts: otium must be actively defended, because negotium invades it spontaneously and leaves no space on its own.

This means, in the first place, learning to say no – to commitments accepted out of habit, courtesy, or fear of disappointing, without their having any real value in one’s life. It also means to choose carefully one’s friends:

“Withdraw into yourself as much as you can; associate with those who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one: men learn as they teach” (Letters, 7.8)

The principle extends naturally to the management of one’s time: not every request for your attention deserves to be granted.

It also means, in the second place, stopping measuring the value of time solely in terms of visible production. Time spent reading a difficult book, taking a walk without a phone, talking with someone you love without hurrying, this time “produces” nothing measurable, but it provides something real: depth, clarity, capacity for thought, and quality of presence.

And it means, in the third place, recognizing that otium is not a reward earned after finishing all the negotium. One never finishes everything, and if one waits to have exhausted all obligations before allowing oneself time, that time never arrives. Otium must be actively carved out of negotium, as an act of choice and priority, not as a residue of whatever happens to be left over.

I want to linger on a few examples of people who seem, in different ways and different eras, to have understood this balance intuitively. After all, as the Stoics kept reminding us, it is very useful to set oneself role models from whom to learn.

Charles Darwin had a daily structure at Down House that was almost obsessively regular. He worked in concentrated bursts of no more than ninety minutes at a stretch, then stopped for a walk on the “thinking path” he had built in his garden, for correspondence, or for rest. And he never worked in the afternoons. This rhythm was partly imposed by his chronic ill health, but Darwin defended it as a matter of principle, not merely necessity. The otium was not the absence of work: it was the condition that made the work possible. The Origin of Species, his books on geology, the volumes he wrote on barnacles and earthworms and orchids – all of it emerged from a life in which deep rest was structural, not incidental.

Montaigne offers a different but equally instructive case. At the age of thirty-eight, he retired to his tower in the Périgord, had Latin inscriptions carved into the beams of his library ceiling, and began to write what would become the Essays. His stated purpose was explicit: to study himself, to record his thoughts as they came, without the pressure of public purpose or professional obligation. The result was one of the most original and influential bodies of writing in the Western tradition, produced precisely because Montaigne had created a space of otium so complete that thinking became the only available activity. He was not fleeing the world, however, he was serving the second, larger republic that Seneca described, the republic of all readers across all time.

Closer to our own era, the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote an essay in 1932 called “In Praise of Idleness” that makes, from a secular and empirical direction, almost exactly Seneca’s argument. Russell contended (already almost a century ago!) that the cult of productivity had impoverished modern life, that four hours of concentrated work per day was sufficient for any serious intellectual contribution, and that the remaining hours ought to be genuinely free, not filled with improving activities or structured leisure, but left open for the mind to wander, make unexpected connections, and recover the capacity for genuine attention. Russell was no Stoic, and the essay has its provocations and exaggerations. But the underlying intuition – that negotium without otium is self-defeating, that the two are not enemies but partners – is one Seneca would have recognized immediately.

What these examples share is something that goes beyond time management, beyond the practical question of how to schedule a day. They point toward a conception of the self as something that requires cultivation – not just exercise and nutrition, not just professional development, but genuine interior space in which thought can deepen, experience can be processed, and values can be examined. Seneca makes this point with particular force in the very first letter to Lucilius:

“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.” (1.3)

The fact is that time is the only resource that genuinely belongs to us, and yet we give it away with a carelessness we would never apply to money, property, or reputation. This is not an argument for selfishness or withdrawal from obligation, but an argument for paying attention to what one is actually doing with the irreplaceable material of one’s life.

Another essay on the same topic, the De brevitate vitae, is written by Seneca as a letter to a man overwhelmed by the demands of public life – his father in law, Pompeius Paulinus. In it we read:

“Can anything be sillier than the point of view of certain people – I mean those who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves very busily engaged in order that they may be able to live better; they spend life in making ready to live! They form their purposes with a view to the distant future; yet postponement is the greatest waste of life; it deprives them of each day as it comes, it snatches from them the present by promising something hereafter. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes today. You dispose of that which lies in the hands of Fortune, you let go that which lies in your own.” (9)

This could easily have been written today, as the demands have changed their form, but their tendency to devour everything has not. Otium, again, is not what remains after negotium has taken its share. It is what must be protected first, so that the negotium that follows has a human being behind it – someone present, capable of depth, capable of genuine attention – rather than a very efficient machine running on empty.

The Stoics liked to remind us that philosophy is not an ornament of life but its architecture. Otium, in this sense, is not a philosophical luxury reserved for retired senators or tower-dwelling essayists. It is the condition under which a human life remains recognizably human – capable of reflection, capable of depth, capable of asking whether what we are doing is actually what we want to be doing with the time we have.

The negotium will always be there. It will expand to fill whatever space you give it. The question Seneca keeps pressing, in writing after writing, is whether you have decided – actually decided, as an act of will – what you will protect from it. Not what you will do when it’s finished, but what you will refuse to let it touch.

The revenge of the philosophy majors. Growing up in Georgia, Robert Long was given to pondering big questions and the meaning of life — before he was 10, he doubted his own free will. But it wasn’t until college, where he majored in social studies, that he learned he could think about consciousness full time. He read a book by Douglas Hofstadter called “I Am a Strange Loop,” which explored mysteries such as What is a self? “I didn’t even realize that those were questions you could ask,” he says, “and then that there were philosophical disciplines about them.”

When Mr. Long entered graduate school at New York University, to study the philosophy of mind, it was with a conventional ambition. “I was very much on the path of publishing in journals, go on the job market, get a job at a university,” he said. When a fellow philosophy Ph.D. candidate told him that she was going to an obscure nonprofit called OpenAI to work on artificial intelligence policy, “I was like, that’s kind of random.”

But Mr. Long, too, found his philosophical interests trending toward A.I. His dissertation was titled “Essays on the Philosophy of Machine Learning.” And he moved to San Francisco to pursue postdoctoral research in early 2023, just when ChatGPT was blowing up. As the new large language models began displaying uncannily humanlike behaviors, he awoke to the dawning significance of potentially conscious A.I. — and to the possibility that something professionally interesting might happen if he stuck around. … (New York Times)

Anti-science is a weapon of mass destruction. I recently happened to come across an old (8 years) YouTube video of Australian senator Pauline Hanson questioning Rear Admiral Greg Sammut on their plan to acquire Shortfin Barracuda Block 1A submarines from France (a plan since replaced). Her line of questioning presumed that the decision had been made haphazardly with little regard for — well, anything. It also revealed that she had not the slightest amount of general common knowledge about mechanical things. Poor Adm. Sammut showed extraordinary patience as he constantly had to explain the most basic facts about submarines to her. It was like teaching calculus to a goldfish. … (Brian’s Bullshit-Free Zone)

How to become wise. ‘We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). This seeking after ourselves, however, is not something that is lacking in Buddhist and Confucian traditions – especially not in the case of Korean philosophy. Self-cultivation, central to the tradition, underscores that the onus is on the individual to develop oneself, without recourse to the divine or the supernatural. Korean philosophy is practical, while remaining agnostic to a large degree: recognising the spirit realm but highlighting that we ourselves take charge of our lives by taking charge of our minds. It is also a tradition of philosophy largely unknown to the West. But I hope that is changing. … (Aeon)

The secret of human intelligence may lie in the power of a single brain cell. What makes the human brain capable of language, imagination, mathematics and invention? For many years, the prevailing view was that the secret of human intelligence lay mainly in scale: the sheer number of neurons in the human brain—close to 100 billion—and the vast network of connections among them. But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that part of the answer may lie at a much smaller scale: in the extraordinary computational power of individual brain cells. … (Medical Xpress)

Scientists are incredibly easy to fool. Scientists are the people with the deepest knowledge in their fields of expertise. That’s all. They’re not necessarily unusually knowledgeable or skilled in other things — no more so than anyone else. That’s not a jab or an insult. I’d say the same thing about you: If you’re a mortgage broker, you probably have very deep knowledge about the current mortgage landscape; but I shouldn’t expect you to also know everything about scuba diving.

If my headline seems a little clickbaity, well, yeah; if I had written it dispassionately, it would have said NON-EXPERTS IN FOOLING PEOPLE ARE BAD AT KNOWING WHEN THEY’RE BEING FOOLED. And you would have rightly said “No shit, Sherlock.” But since I said scientists, you may have taken it as a bit of an affront to scientists. It’s not at all.

Why, then, do so many people hire scientists when they’re actually looking for skill in the arts of deception? … (Brian Dunning's Bullshit-free Zone)

According to Alfred North Whitehead’s so-called process metaphysics, the fabric of the world consists of processes, not static entities. As we have seen last time, this is a notion that – in one form or another – pops up in both western (Heraclitus of Ephesus) and eastern (Buddhism, Taoism) philosophies. While there is a very important kernel of truth in it, Whitehead went horribly wrong with his notion that metaphysics can, and indeed should, come before any epistemological account of how we can say anything about the nature of the world.

In this second part I wish to briefly examine in a bit more detail three fundamental ideas articulated by Whitehead and gesture toward why they go horribly wrong: panpsychism (and panexperientialism), eternal objects in the mind of God, and dipolar panentheism. After that, we’ll see what can be done about the important project of recovering the very notion of process metaphysics.

The three most objectionable moves

(i) Panpsychism & Panexperientialism

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness or mind-like properties are fundamental and ubiquitous in nature. According to this theory, mentality exists at some level in all things – from atoms to humans – not just in brains or living organisms. A distinct but related view is panexperientialism, which holds that all actual entities (in Whitehead’s sense of the term, see part I) have a form of experience or feeling, though this is somehow distinguished from full-fledged consciousness.

Let’s start with panexperientialism. Whitehead’s argument is that we can avoid the specter of metaphysical dualism by declaring that experience goes all the way down to electrons, which “solves” the mind-body problem by stipulation.

The fact is, though, that this isn’t an explanation but a simple relabeling. Saying that electrons “experience” their environment in some proto-conscious way explains absolutely nothing about how or why subjective experience arises from physical processes. It merely pushes the mystery down to the basement and declares victory by calling it a solution.

Panpsychism, on its part, notoriously faces the combination problem: even if electrons have micro-experience (whatever that means), how do billions of them combine to produce the unified, qualitative experience of a human being? Whitehead’s answer – through “societies” of occasions supervised by a dominant “regnant” occasion – simply restates the problem at a higher level, introducing vacuous terminology that doesn’t bear any contact with empirical reality.

If panpsychism can’t explain the transition from micro-experience to unified consciousness, it explains nothing we actually care about. The so-called “hard problem” isn’t dissolved, it’s duplicated: now you have to explain it at both levels.

By contrast, scientists studying consciousness (from its neural correlates to contemporary integrated information theory debates) work with empirically tractable, falsifiable proposals. Whitehead’s panexperientialism is neither, it is a philosophical preference masquerading as a solution.

Unfortunately, panpsychism has become fashionable again in certain philosophy-of-mind circles, thanks to authors like Philip Goff and Galen Strawson, but their versions remain equally scientifically ungrounded (and philosophically highly problematic).

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Panta rhei, everything flows, said the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus. You cannot step into the same river twice, not because of any mystical reason, but because rivers are constituted by continuous flux. In modern terms, a proton isn’t a thing sitting there, it’s a continuous process of quarks exchanging gluons, existing only in virtue of those interactions.

This ancient intuition is genuinely profound and scientifically vindicated, yet in its 20th-century elaboration by Alfred North Whitehead, it got buried under an avalanche of invented metaphysical furniture – panpsychism, eternal objects lodged in a divine mind, and a God who “prehends” electrons.

What I’ll try to show in what follows is that so-called process philosophy starts with a good map of reality, then gets catastrophically lost in its own labyrinth. Which is too bad, because Heraclitus (and the Stoics he influenced) was on to something important, and it would be nice to be able to recover the right path once the modern briars have been cleared from the road.

The kernel of truth: processes all the way down

The Heraclitean insight is in agreement with the best contemporary science. Modern physics strongly supports a process ontology over a substance ontology. Elementary particles are not little billiard balls, they are excitations of quantum fields. Quantum field theory describes the world as fundamentally relational and dynamic. There are no enduring intrinsic substances, only patterns of interaction and becoming.

Moreover, according to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, spacetime itself is a dynamic structure, not a fixed container. As a result, events and their causal relations are more fundamental than objects.

Biology and chemistry also confirm the broad picture: what we call an organism is better described as a set of processes – metabolism, homeostasis, evolution – than as a fixed thing. Even the self is processual: no serious neuroscientist believes in a static, substance-like “soul.”

Non western traditions have produced similar intuitions: the Buddhist pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination) and the rejection of a permanent self (anātman) express remarkably similar intuitions, as does certain Taoist thinking about flux, although these schools of thought didn’t develop the systematic metaphysical overreach Whitehead did, for better and worse.

More recently, the American pragmatists – John Dewey, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce – have for different reasons been considered process philosophers, though they stayed relatively close to empirical experience and avoided the worst excesses of the Whitehead line that I’m criticizing here.

Whitehead’s system: a guided tour of the labyrinth

So, in what, exactly, does Whitehead’s process philosophy consist, and why do I think it has taken a really bad turn, metaphysically and epistemologically speaking? Let me give you a very brief tour of the main concepts.

Whitehead’s most basic move is to reject substance metaphysics and replace it with momentary events called “actual occasions” or actual entities. According to him, electrons, people, and even God are all instances of the same fundamental category. The world is a vast web of these events, each “feeling” (prehending is the technical term he uses) all past occasions before achieving “satisfaction” (his word) and becoming data for future occasions. When an actual occasion “prehends” its past, it’s as if every electron in the universe had to consult the entire history of the cosmos before making its next move. Confused? You should be!

All actual occasions, including electrons, possess experience in some form, though somehow (Whitehead never explains how) experience precedes consciousness, so he’s not saying that electrons are conscious. This is his way of avoiding dualism: mind and matter are not distinct kinds of stuff but different grades of the same experiential process. (I am a physicalist, so I avoid dualism by saying that “mind” is not a separate category – either in terms of substance or of properties – from matter.)

This aspect of Whitehead’s metaphysics goes under the self-explanatory term of “panexperientialism.” Since I think experience is not possible without some level of consciousness, I believe he’s talking nonsense, strictly speaking.

Now, for there to be determinate character in the world, Whitehead posits eternal objects, something like (but not quite the same as) Platonic Forms. These eternal objects “ingress” (notice the quasi-comical proliferation of new terms!) into actual occasions to give them specific qualities. The eternal objects in question are, conveniently, housed in the mind of God.

Speaking of which, Whitehead’s theology is referred to as dipolar panentheism: God enters as a “metaphysical necessity,” a dipolar actual entity with a primordial nature (the storehouse of eternal objects) and a consequent nature (temporally engaged, prehending every actual occasion in the universe as it occurs, growing with the world).

This is neither classical theism, which describes God as transcending the world, nor pantheism, which says that God is immanent in the world. Instead, it is panentheism, the notion that God is both coincident with the world and yet somehow also outside the world. In other words, all things exist within God, but God is more than the sum of all things. Good luck making sense of that one.

Whitehead calls his method “speculative philosophy” and his description of it is rather self-congratulatory, as it is supposed to somehow seamlessly merge science, aesthetic experience, imagination, and religious intuitions, among other things. He uses an interesting metaphor to get the point across: imagine an airplane that takes off from the ground of experience, soars high into imagination, but eventually must come back to the ground and make contact with experience again. From where I stand, his plane took off but got lost in space and never made it back home.

The epistemological void: metaphysics without a safety net

Why is all of the above highly problematic? For one thing, because process philosophy explicitly and proudly announces that it reverses the post-Cartesian tradition by doing ontology before epistemology, a radically bad move, in my immodest opinion. I argued before that whenever philosophers, scientists, or anyone proposes a new notion, hypothesis, or theory, the obvious question is: how do you know that? If the answer is vague and involves a lot of hand-waving, then we can smell bullshit and we are entitled to dismiss the whole thing as not even wrong.

An excellent article about process philosophy, published by J.R. Hustwit in the (peer reviewed) Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, notes that Whitehead deliberately sidesteps Kant’s transcendental critique by going “neoclassical.”

In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant examines how human knowledge is possible by investigating the mind’s role in structuring experience. He argues that our cognition doesn’t simply reflect reality but actively structures it through innate mental frameworks (such as the concepts of space and time).

Kant’s critique isn’t just a modern fad, it’s the hard-won recognition that we need an account of how knowledge is possible before we build castles in the sky. You can’t (or shouldn’t) circumvent that by calling it “pre-modern” and then dismissing it.

Whitehead does gesture toward science, in fact he does it constantly. His main opus, after all, is entitled Science and the Modern World. But he uses scientific findings selectively as inspiration rather than as constraint. He never seriously grapples with what it would mean for his metaphysics to be falsified. His “actual occasions” do not map onto anything in quantum field theory, they are not derived from experiment or observation, and they are not subject to revision by physics. They are armchair constructs dressed in scientific-sounding language.

In fairness, Whitehead was writing in the 1920s-30s, when quantum mechanics was brand new and its implications were contested. So he had some excuse for not taking physics seriously as a constraint. His contemporary followers, however, writing after quantum field theory, the Standard Model, and contemporary neuroscience, have considerably less.

Whitehead claims his system is valid if it is internally coherent and adequate to all of human experience, including, as I said, the religious, aesthetic, and moral kinds. But coherence is not truth, and human experience can go seriously wrong. An internally consistent system can be gloriously, completely wrong. (Unless we are talking about pure mathematics or logic, which do not have to refer to anything in the real world.) Moreover, the notion of “adequacy to experience” is so elastic that it can justify almost anything: astrology, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Aristotelian physics were all “adequate to experience” by their own lights.

In practice, process philosophy’s speculations – be they actual occasions, prehension, or dipolar Gods – are never seriously tested against or constrained by what physics, chemistry, neuroscience, or biology actually find. The resulting system is therefore self-sealing: problems within it are solved by adding more epicycles (like eternal objects, or a mysterious principle of creativity as “ultimate reality”) rather than by consulting the world. This is not the way to do serious metaphysics, but there is an alternative, as we shall see in part II.

[Next time: three objectionable moves and how to salvage the river]

Welcome to another episode of Ars Vivendi, our occasional series of video conversations on the art of living where I talk to authors who have written about philosophy as a way of life.

This installment features yours truly being interviewed by my friend and colleague Skye Cleary about my recent book, How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic, a philosophical, historical, and biographical exploration of the work of Marcus Tullius Cicero, with an emphasis on what we can learn and apply from it in order to live a better and more meaningful life today.

Praise for the book includes:

“How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic is the book we’ve been waiting for! If you’ve ever recoiled from Stoicism as too austere, this book offers a sensible, socially responsible middle ground to living the life you want. What’s more, it is the single best guide now available to the rich body of practical wisdom written by Marcus Tullius Cicero.”
—Michael Fontaine, author of How to Have Willpower

“To his talents as a natural writer, expert historian of philosophy, and committed practical ethicist, Massimo Pigliucci here adds the skills of a gifted biographer. His deft interweaving of Cicero’s life with an inquiry into how to best live our own makes this book a compelling and spiritually uplifting achievement.”
—James Romm, author of Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

“Massimo Pigliucci has written a highly original and hopeful book about the philosophical ideas of Cicero. In a disarmingly personal style he makes a convincing case for why all of us would do well to think and live more like Cicero today, offering the reader hands on advice on how to do so along the way. A thoroughly enjoyable read!”
—Inger N. I. Kuin, author of Diogenes: The Rebellious Life and Revolutionary Philosophy of the Original Cynic

Here is our conversation:

Imagine that a pharmaceutical company were marketing a new mood-enhancing vitamin, one that makes you happy – meaning that it improves your self-reported subjective well-being (SWB), as psychologists like to put it. I’m sure we’d demand rigorous evidence before recommending it for daily use, no? Yet behavioural recommendations for “happiness” circulate freely, especially among so-called influencers, backed by far less scrutiny.

A paper published in Nature Human Behaviour a few years ago by University of British Columbia’s Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn, entitled “A systematic review of the strength of evidence for the most commonly recommended happiness strategies in mainstream media,” addressed precisely this problem on the basis of the most rigorous data available so far.

Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that happiness is what all human action aims at, and Google agrees: “how to be happy” is searched for more than “how to get rich,” which is saying something!

Folk and Dunn wanted to investigate just how much scientific evidence is there on behalf of various types of advice floating around, so they took an in-depth critical look at the available literature in what is sometimes called “positive” psychology, that is, the psychology of everyday life, as distinct from pathologies.

Before we delve into what they found, it’s good to keep in mind the relevant background: the so-called replication crisis that hit the field in 2011. It was around that time that it became clear just how many findings in the psychological literature were likely false positives. This was the result of a number of key culprits: p-hacking, small underpowered samples, no pre-registration, and selective reporting.

P-hacking (or data dredging) refers to the practice of manipulating data analysis until statistically significant results (probability of a chance result, p < 0.05) are found. Researchers might try different combinations of variables, exclude outliers selectively, or stop collecting data only once significance is reached, rather than adhering to a fixed sample size. This effectively tests multiple hypotheses on the same dataset without adjusting for the increased likelihood of chance findings, leading to many “significant” results that do not reflect true effects.

Small, underpowered samples are due to resource constraints, which do not allow researchers to use large sample sizes. When the power of a study is low, however, the few positive results one might find tend to emerge because of statistical noise rather than an actual signal, making the results nearly impossible to replicate in larger, better-powered follow-up studies.

Lack of pre-registration means that researchers have complete flexibility to change their hypotheses or analysis plans after seeing the data. Without a publicly timestamped record of the original plan, there is no way to distinguish between confirmatory research (testing a specific prediction) and exploratory research (looking for patterns). This flexibility may allow researchers to present post-hoc findings as if they were predicted in advance, obscuring the true rate of hypothesis testing.

Finally, selective reporting, closely tied to the other three issues, involves publishing only the studies or outcomes that yield positive, significant results while filing away negative or null outcomes (the “file drawer problem”). This creates a distorted literature where the published consensus suggests strong, consistent effects that simply do not exist in the broader set of conducted research, rendering attempts to replicate those specific findings largely futile.

Together, these practices created a feedback loop where non-replicable findings were published as facts, reinforcing a culture that rewarded novelty over rigor until the field began shifting toward open science practices like registered reports and data sharing. To be clear: the replication crisis is not a reason to shrug off psychology as a scientific endeavor. On the contrary, it is a good, if painful, example of how science at its best works: it was psychologists themselves, including Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who pointed out the problem and suggested and implemented the necessary solutions.

Back to Folk and Dunn’s paper: because of the replication crisis, they set high methodological standards, focusing only on (a) experimental (not correlational) designs; (b) pre-registered studies; and (c) studies with sufficient statistical power (≥80% power to detect d = 0.43, which is the average published social psychology effect size).

Folk and Dunn also stayed away from so-called meta-analyses, the practice – diffuse in psychology and biology – of aggregating a large number of published studies and producing overall statistics summarizing any underlying trend. This was a wise move on their part, because meta-analyses are known to yield estimates of effect sizes that are roughly three times those of large-scale pre-registered replications.

The study in Nature Human Behavior focused on five strategies that are often recommended for increasing SWB. Here is how the authors themselves describe them:

1. Gratitude: expressing gratitude for people and events in one’s life by writing in a gratitude journal, thinking about how lucky one is, and writing gratitude letters;

2. Social interactions: socializing and reaching out to close friends and family, interacting with strangers and increasing sociability;

3. Mindfulness / meditation: engaging in mindfulness meditation, breathing exercises and loving kindness meditation;

4. Exercise and physical activity: engaging in physical activity such as lifting weights, running, walking, playing sports or yoga;

5. Nature exposure: increasing the time one spends around nature by getting fresh air, going for nature walks or adding plants to one’s home.

And here, briefly, are the results:

1. Gratitude – Verdict: modest support, with caveats

This turns out to be the best-supported strategy of the five. Two well-powered, pre-registered studies show short-term boosts in positive affect from gratitude expression. However, the popular recommendation to write gratitude letters is surprisingly weak, while gratitude lists seem to fare better. Moreover, benefits fade quickly when the practice stops. Overall, then, the approach is reasonably solid, but not the slam dunk the wellness industry often implies.

2. Social interaction – Verdict: fairly solid, but narrow

Folk and Dunn found good evidence that talking to strangers boosts mood (even on the London Underground!). Acting extraverted also shows benefits, but there’s a striking gap: there is almost no rigorous research to be found on the most common recommendation, that is, spending more time with close friends and family. So the most intuitive piece of advice is actually the least tested.

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This is an ongoing series on Epictetus’s Discourses, a book that literally changed my life and that, I think, is grossly underestimated nowadays, despite Epictetus’s major influence throughout the Middle Ages up to the Enlightenment and the founding of the American republic. Read what follows with an eye to its practical applications, the Master would have thrown you out of his school if he thought you were doing philosophy as a purely theoretical exercise! In these essays I’m using Robin Waterfield’s annotated translation. Two good public domain translations are collected in the Delphi Classics edition. Previous entries can be found by consulting the Figs in Winter Index.

_____

To be content seems like a rather modest objective in one’s life. In our hyper-competitive, ultra-consumeristic, celebrity-obsessed culture we are taught never to be content, that’s for losers! What we should want instead is to crush the competition, to acquire ever more stuff, to become famous regardless of whether there is any substance to what we do.

That’s why it’s so refreshing to pay attention to the Stoic Epictetus, a slave-turned-teacher who understood much about what makes for a good life, and who today is decidedly counter-culture, subversive, even.

In section 12 of the first book of his Discourses, Epictetus addresses the issue of contentment, but begins in a rather odd place:

“On the subject of the gods, there are some who deny their very existence, and others who admit their existence, but say that they’re ineffective and don’t exercise any care or forethought. A third group admits both their existence and their providence but only with regard to large-scale, heavenly phenomena, not to anything that happens on earth. A fourth group claims that they also take thought for things on earth and human affairs, but only in a general way, and that their providence doesn’t apply to individuals. Then there’s a fifth group, among whom are Odysseus and Socrates, who say, ‘Nor am I hidden from you as I go on my way.’” (1.12.1-3)

What on earth is he talking about, and what does this have to do with contentment? He begins by listing a number of then (and now!) common positions about the nature of the gods. The second one, for instance, is typical of the Epicureans. Epictetus himself has a preference for the last entry, a view that he attributes to both Odysseus (who is quoted from Homer’s Odyssey while he is addressing Athena) and Socrates, both of whom were Stoic role models.

Epictetus explains immediately afterwards that he is trying to determine which of the above positions is the most sound because how can one live according to the gods, if one doesn’t understand the nature of the divine? To live according to the gods was a phrase used by a number of philosophers, including the Pythagoreans and the Platonists, though in the case of the Stoics it is often rendered with the more neutral “live according to nature.”

The Master concludes that: “After a thorough examination of these matters, then, a truly good person subordinates his intellect to the power that governs the universe.” (1.12.7) At this point, one of his students raises an objection: “But my wish is for everything to turn out just as I want it to, no matter what it is.” And he gets the predictable response:

“That’s insane! You’re out of your mind! … Look, how do we go about writing? Do I get to write the name ‘Dion’ in any way I like? No, I’m taught to want to write it as it should be written. And what about music? The same. What about in general, wherever some skill or expertise is involved? It must be the same, otherwise expertise would be quite worthless, if it changed according to every individual’s wishes. … Education consists precisely in learning to want everything to happen as it does happen.” (1.12.13-15)

This is a very insightful reply, and one that gets at the core of Epictetus’s philosophy. Freedom, he says, doesn’t consist in doing whatever one wishes, at random. It consists in making the best use of any given structure one operates within. If the structure is grammar, then we write “Dion” using the proper sequence of the four letters that make up the name; if the structure is musical notation, we write and play our music accordingly. If, finally, the structure is the world itself and the web of cause and effect that regulates it, we follow that as well. What happens if we don’t?

“You can’t stand hardship of any kind; you’re always dissatisfied. If you’re on your own, you call it loneliness, and if you’re with people, you say they’re schemers and thieves. You find fault even with your parents, children, brothers, and neighbors. When you’re on your own, you should call that peace and freedom, and think of it as a godlike existence; and when you’re in a crowd, you shouldn’t call it a mob or focus on the noise and discomfort, but think of it as a celebration and a festival, and so accept and be contented with everything.” (1.12.20-21)

People are never happy because they always look at the empty half of the glass. If they trained themselves to accept situations they don’t control as they come, they would not be so troubled. This is the Stoic application of a powerful concept in modern psychology, the framing effect. Bill Irvine wrote a whole book about it, in which he invites us to exploit the effect for our own benefit, turning it from a cognitive bias into a powerful tool for self-therapy.

Look carefully at the examples Epictetus provides to his students: if you are alone, don’t label the situation “loneliness” but peace; conversely, when you find yourself among others, don’t use the label “mob,” think of it instead as a festival! That’s what contentment is: not just a generic “think positively,” but an active reframing of what is happening in a way that is useful and more conducive to flourishing. Otherwise, says the sage from Hierapolis, you’ll be in prison:

“What prison? The one [you’re] in now. I mean, [you don’t] want to be where [you are], and any place where someone doesn’t want to be is a prison for him. That’s why Socrates wasn’t in prison, because he was there by his own choice.” (1.12.23)

Famously, Socrates had the opportunity, at his trial, to avoid the death sentence, but declined in order to make a point about the worth of what he had been doing for decades on behalf of the Athenian people. Later on, once in jail, he again had a chance to escape, since his friends had corrupted the guards. But he refused on the grounds that one should not obey the law only when it suits him. Therefore, he was there of his own volition, and thus not really in prison, despite appearances to the contrary. The broader point is explained by Epictetus shortly thereafter:

“Don’t you realize how small a part you are compared to the whole – in respect of your body, I mean: as far as your reason is concerned, you’re no worse than or inferior to the gods, because the greatness of reason is not assessed by length and height but by the quality of its judgments. … So for what have [the gods] made you accountable? Only for what’s up to you, which is the proper use of impressions. So why are you taking on things for which you’re unaccountable? You’re just making trouble for yourself.” (1.12.26, 34-35)

Our physical bodies are tiny and weak compared to the vastness of the cosmos, but our rational minds share with the divine, since reason can only be measured by the soundness of our judgments. And that, and only that, Epictetus concludes, is our business: to train ourselves so that we make the best use of our impressions. Everything else in life follows from that most crucial step.

Have people stopped trusting science? The data tell a surprising story. From the United States to Europe to Brazil, there is a pervasive sense that trust in science has collapsed.

A UK survey published in January found that only 40% of people think that science information they hear is “generally true”. Another global poll showed that 70% of people believe at least one false or unproven claim, such as that the risks of childhood vaccines outweigh the benefits.

In the United States, President Donald Trump and his administration are using the idea that science is not trustworthy as one reason to cut research budgets, reject evidence-based medical advice and exert unprecedented political control over research. “Over the last 5 years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly,” said Trump in an executive order last year.

Even the Vatican is voicing concern. This September, a meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences will examine how “the crisis of trust in science has become a pressing issue”. … (Nature)

Hello from Torino, Italy! (On Traveling, Returning, and Boxing) Since I arrived in Turin in northern Italy last month, life has been somewhat of a heat-induced flurry. What I’ve just read: Yesteryear (I have much to say about that one), re-reading Calvino’s The Watcher, which takes place here in Torino, and an essay on V. Woolf in Margot Livesey’s “The Hidden Machinery” and two books by friends. Also reading with dark glee about recent Chat/AI tics: metaphors that don’t hold up to scrutiny and “it’s not X, it’s Y.”

The week I arrived, I took a three day workshop on Cicero with Massimo, John Sellars, and Rob Colter and celebrated the launch of MBF’s truly brilliant Cicero book, How to Be A (Happy) Skeptic: The Power of Doubt In A Meaningful Life also a book launch with philosopher Skye Cleary. (Alas, we missed the women’s boxing match, Botte della Madonna, that was part of the massive pride march here in Torino). … (Si Omnia Ficta)

The “women are better multitaskers” stereotype is messier than you think. In a TikTok video that has racked up 1.4 million likes, men are handed scissors and a sheet of paper and asked to cut out a Christmas tree while describing their favorite memory with their partner. The men start telling a story, but most trail off as they concentrate on the cutting. In another clip, a woman calmly juggles four different chores while her husband struggles to put on socks and hold a conversation simultaneously.

These videos are designed to make you laugh. But they also reflect and reinforce the idea that women are better multitaskers than men. Studies putting this stereotype to the test have yielded very mixed results. Yet the idea that there is a gender difference in the ability to multitask remains lodged in the public mind. Researchers think there are various reasons why the stereotype persists. … (Big Think)

5 dangerous lies we tell ourselves, according to philosophy. We live according to our beliefs. Some beliefs we know well. A Christian knows they believe in God. An ethical vegetarian knows they believe eating animals is wrong. But other beliefs swish around in the rock pools of our unconscious. They are tacit assumptions that motivate our actions but never appear on an employment contract or in a legal document. And even though we rarely pause to examine them, these beliefs or narratives will steer our lives. They are why we get out of bed, think the way we do, and chase the dreams we have. … (Mini Philosophy)

AI and the anguish of choosing. While rereading Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism for my Aeon magazine essay, I began to wonder about how existential thinking applies to AI.

Sartre argues that you’re the sum of your actions, implying that what you do is what you mean. He said this over 80 years ago, to a room that had run out of chairs and was overflowing with people trying to make sense of WWII and figure out how to live after the atrocities had thrown their understanding of the world and their values into question. … (Skye Cleary)

Imagine you have just been passed over for a promotion you deserved. One of your colleagues – less experienced, less diligent, better connected – got the job instead. You are a middle manager at a company you have worked for twelve years. You are also a parent, a spouse, a friend to several people who depend on your equanimity. You are, let us say, someone with a naturally competitive temperament, who has always cared, perhaps too much, about recognition. What should you do? More precisely: what does Stoicism say you should do?

The answer, it turns out, depends on which Stoic you ask. And the difference between two of the most sophisticated answers ever given – one from Panaetius of Rhodes, transmitted to us by Cicero in On Duties, the other from Epictetus in his Discourses and Enchiridion, as reconstructed by Brian Johnson in The Role Ethics of Epictetus – reveals a genuine fault line running through the entire tradition.

Panaetius, the second-century BCE Stoic who became a close friend of Scipio Aemilianus and did more than anyone to bring Greek philosophy into the Roman mainstream, developed what we might call a pluralistic account of moral identity. Cicero, in De Officiis, describes it as the doctrine of four personae, four masks or roles that every person wears simultaneously.

The first mask is universal: we are all rational and social animals, and this grounds the obligations we share with every other human being regardless of circumstance. The second mask is individual: each of us has a particular temperament, a constellation of natural talents and tendencies that distinguish us from everyone else. The third mask is circumstantial: the family we were born into, the country and historical moment we inhabit, the social position fortune has assigned us. The fourth mask is chosen: the profession we pursue, the philosophical school we join, the commitments we voluntarily undertake.

Panaetius’s central ethical concept is decorum, that is, appropriateness, fitting conduct. The virtuous person is not someone who applies a single universal algorithm to every situation, but someone who has the practical wisdom to act at the intersection of all four roles. And crucially, the second mask (individual temperament) carries real moral weight. Panaetius is explicit, and Cicero enthusiastically agrees: you should not force yourself to be what you are not. The person of reserved, scholarly temperament should not pretend to be a gregarious political operator; the naturally witty person should cultivate that wit rather than suppress it in the name of some generic ideal of Stoic gravitas. Nature has given you a particular character. Work with it, not against it.

Returning to our passed-over manager: Panaetius would want to know a great deal about you before prescribing anything. What is your natural temperament? Does the competitive streak run so deep that suppressing it will produce a simmering resentment that poisons your relationships? What are your social roles? Do your children need a parent who models resilience, or one who models the willingness to fight for fairness? What did you voluntarily sign up for when you joined this company? What are the implicit obligations of that chosen role? The Panaetian answer is thick, contextual, and irreducibly particular. There is no formula: there is only the trained judgment of someone who knows themselves well across all four dimensions.

Epictetus would find all of this interesting, and then he would set most of it aside. For Epictetus, the former slave from Hierapolis who became the most psychologically penetrating of all the Stoic teachers, the multiplicity of roles is acknowledged but not the main event. The theatrical metaphor he uses is precise and deliberate: we are actors in a play whose script was written by someone else. The Author, be it God, Zeus, Nature, or the rational structure of the cosmos, assigns us our parts. One person is cast as the rich man, another as the pauper. One plays the role of the healthy athlete, another the chronically ill. Some of us are given the role of the politically powerful, others spend decades under circumstances not of their choosing. The actor’s job, and it is the only job that matters, is to play the assigned role excellently, with full rational attention, integrity, and presence.

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A friend recently pointed out what he took to be a contradiction in my political views. I favor Taiwan’s independence from China and support Ukraine’s right to resist Russian annexation of its eastern regions, but I am a bit skeptical about, say, the Basque Country separating from Spain or Scotland leaving the United Kingdom. Isn’t this inconsistent? Do I believe in the right of people to self-determination, or don’t I?

It’s a fair challenge, and it deserves a careful answer. But as I’ll argue, the apparent contradiction dissolves once you notice that these cases differ in almost every morally relevant way. More interestingly, working through the differences forces us to confront a deeper question: what, exactly, are we committed to when we invoke “self-determination” as a political value? And what should we make of the principled pacifist position, which is my friend’s view, that the avoidance of war should override everything else?

Let’s start with Taiwan. It has functioned as a fully independent democratic state since 1949. It has its own military, its own currency, its own constitution, and a government chosen through free elections. Nevertheless, at the moment of this writing, only 11 countries and the Vatican officially recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation, though another 28 (including most European countries, Canada, and the United States) consider the status of Taiwan to be “unsettled.”

The question in the Taiwan Strait is not really “should Taiwan separate from China?,” since it was never part of the People’s Republic of China to begin with (the two nations were established at the same time). The real question is whether China should be permitted to forcibly absorb a functioning democracy against the will of its population. My intuition here is driven less by abstract self-determination and more by opposition to aggressive annexation of a democratic polity by an authoritarian one.

Consider now Donbas – the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine. This is different in almost every relevant dimension. The “self-determination” invoked there was manufactured through Russian military intervention, fought by irregular forces operating alongside Russian regulars, and ratified by referenda conducted under occupation, with populations displaced and independent observation impossible. Whatever genuine Russophone cultural identity existed in those regions, and it did exist, it was cynically weaponized as a pretext for territorial expansion and the will of the people was never freely expressed. In my opinion, this is much closer to a fabricated legitimacy crisis than a genuine independence movement.

What about Scotland and the Basque Country? These are harder cases, but for different reasons. Both involve genuine cultural and linguistic minorities within democratic states, with real and longstanding popular sentiment for independence. Here there is no annexation, no occupying army, no manufactured referendum. The question is purely one of constitutional self-determination within a functioning liberal democracy.

In terms of the philosophical reasoning underlying my positions, when I defend Taiwan and Ukraine, I am not relying on a single principle but on three converging considerations, weighted differently depending on the case.

The first is democratic self-determination. Peoples have a claim to govern themselves, especially when they have demonstrated a stable political identity over time. This applies with some force to all four cases, though more strongly to some than others.

The second is resistance to violent annexation. There is a strong moral presumption, which I take to be close to a threshold condition, against allowing one state to forcibly absorb another’s territory, especially through military means. This consideration is decisive in the Taiwan and Ukraine cases. It is essentially irrelevant to Scotland and the Basque Country, since neither the UK nor Spain is attempting to annex anyone by force.

The third is the consequences of appeasement. History gives us strong empirical reasons to believe that consistently rewarding aggressive territorial expansion produces more aggression, not less. The lesson of the 1930s – Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, Prague – is that each concession made the next demand more likely, not less. This argument does most of its work in the Taiwan and Ukraine cases, where an external power is making coercive demands. It does very little work in the Scottish or Basque contexts.

Notice what follows from applying these three considerations differently weighted across cases. Taiwan and Ukraine trigger all three, and the annexation argument alone is nearly decisive, I think. Scotland and the Basque Country trigger only the first, and in a weaker form, since the relevant question is not resistance to aggression but whether democratic aspirations should be accommodated through negotiation and referendum. The framework isn’t producing inconsistent verdicts, it’s doing exactly what a multi-consideration framework should do: generating different conclusions because the cases genuinely differ.

I do have sympathy for the wishes of both the Scots and the Basque, who have indeed suffered oppression historically. But I’m also in favor of a strong and unified Europe (despite the highly unfortunate Brexit episode), because I think it needs to play the role of counterbalancing superpower in the wake of oppressive Russia and China and an increasingly unhinged (and never really liberal-democratic) United States.

So much for my opinions on the matter. My friend’s position is different in kind. His overriding principle is the avoidance of war, and to his credit, he follows it consistently: if China wants Taiwan and Russia wants Donbas, and letting them have these territories prevents armed conflict, then that is what should happen. Neville Chamberlain, he might note, was not stupid or cowardly. He had vivid memories of the First World War, with seventeen million dead, and believed sincerely that peace was worth almost any price.

This is a philosophically serious position, and I don’t want to dismiss it with cheap rhetoric about Munich. But it faces several objections that I find, in the end, decisive.

The first is structural. A consistent policy of giving aggressors what they want to avoid war creates a powerful incentive for future aggression. The more reliably the international community capitulates, the more attractive territorial expansion becomes for states willing to threaten force. The long-run consequence of principled appeasement is likely more wars, not fewer, because you are deferring and compounding the violence rather than preventing it. This is not idle speculation: it is roughly what the historical record of the interwar period shows.

The second objection is about whose preferences count. My friend’s principle effectively privileges the preferences of whichever party is most willing to use violence. Taiwan doesn’t want war any more than China does. Ukraine doesn’t want war any more than Russia does. Why does the aggressor’s readiness to make war override the defender’s right not to be conquered? A genuine anti-war principle should be symmetrical. As stated, it systematically favors whoever has more military power and fewer moral scruples.

The third objection is about what we mean by peace. Life under occupation or authoritarian annexation is not peace in any meaningful sense. It involves suppression of political dissent, imprisonment of activists, erasure of language and culture, and often systematic violence that simply doesn’t register as “war” in the conventional sense. We have a vivid example in the Uyghur population of Xinjiang: no open warfare, enormous suffering. A moral framework that counts only battlefield deaths as violence is quietly doing a great deal of work that deserves to be made explicit and scrutinized.

Finally, the argument proves too much. Taken to its logical conclusion, my friend’s principle would have required the Allied powers not to resist Hitler after the fall of Poland, or France, or even after the invasion of the Soviet Union, since resistance meant war. Almost no one actually bites that bullet, and the fact is that we don’t suggest that the avoidance of war, however important, should be the sole supreme value in political morality.

I should be fair to my friend’s position by presenting its most sophisticated form. The strongest version of the anti-escalation argument does not deny any of the above. It says, rather, that modern warfare involving nuclear-armed great powers introduces a category of risk that changes the calculus in ways that conventional moral principles cannot fully capture. Even a small probability of nuclear exchange should dominate expected-value calculations given the catastrophic nature of the outcome. Taiwan, in particular, sits at the intersection of Chinese territorial claims and American security commitments (pre-Trump, of course), with China’s growing nuclear arsenal in the background. The tail risk here is not negligible.

This is a good argument. I think those of us who support robust defense of Taiwan and Ukraine are obligated to take it seriously rather than waving it away. The response, I believe, is not to dismiss the risk but to argue that consistent deterrence, demonstrating that aggression will be costly, is itself the best long-run strategy for reducing the probability of catastrophic conflict. A world in which democracies credibly resist annexation is less likely to produce the kind of unconstrained revisionist behavior that eventually makes great-power war unavoidable. But this is an empirical argument, and reasonable people can weigh the probabilities differently.

Returning to the cases that generated my friend’s original challenge: I am prepared to accept that my framework yields a genuinely more sympathetic verdict on Scottish and Basque aspirations than a simple “territorial integrity” principle would. Democratic self-determination, taken seriously, does give some weight to the expressed preferences of cultural and linguistic minorities within democratic states, especially when those preferences are strong and longstanding.

But it matters enormously how those aspirations are pursued. Scotland held a legal independence referendum in 2014, negotiated with Westminster, and the result – 55% to remain – was accepted by both sides. That is precisely the right model: peaceful, democratic, and legitimate within the constitutional framework of the host state. The Basque Country has been denied an equivalent process by Madrid, which is a real grievance. But even there, the appropriate remedy is democratic pressure and constitutional negotiation, not the kind of resistance that would be warranted against military annexation.

The key point is that without the annexation and appeasement considerations doing any work, democratic self-determination alone is a weaker and more procedural value. It says: these aspirations deserve to be heard, and referenda should not be indefinitely blocked. It does not say: these regions are entitled to independence regardless of the outcome of democratic processes.

There is something clarifying about laying all of this out explicitly, for which I sincerely thank my friend, who engaged with me on these topics over a delicious dinner in Turin. The original charge of inconsistency rested on the assumption that “self-determination” is a single principle applied uniformly. But moral and political reasoning rarely works that way, and when it does, the results are usually worse, not better, than reasoning from multiple considerations that track the genuine complexity of particular cases.

What I am committed to, in the end, is something like this: legitimate political change requires a freely expressed democratic will, pursued without military coercion, through processes that the relevant parties recognize as legitimate. That principle generates different verdicts across different cases not because it is being applied inconsistently, but because the cases themselves differ in ways that matter morally.

My friend’s single-principle pacifism has the virtue of consistency and the vice of insensitivity to everything that principle rides roughshod over. My multi-consideration approach has the virtue of tracking real moral complexity and the vice of requiring ongoing judgment about how to weigh competing values. I’ll take the second set of trade-offs. Judgment, as Cicero would remind us, is not a weakness in moral reasoning, it is its highest expression.

Here is another occasional installment of media appearances featuring, well, myself. Apologies for the presumption, but I imagine that — since you are subscribing to Figs in Winter — you may have at least a passing interest in what else I do and talk about. So here you will find links to recent interviews, podcasts, external articles, and other assorted media appearances featuring yours truly. Enjoy, I hope!

The Delphic injunctions. For hundreds of years during Antiquity people went on pilgrimages to the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, hoping for prophecies that would help them in their lives. This included everyone from kings to regular folks. Even today you can sense the attraction: I went to Delphi three times, and it really is a magical place even if one doesn’t believe in magic. One of my favorite stories about Delphi is a wonderful example of political genius dressed up as religious interpretation. In 480 BCE, with Xerxes’ massive Persian army already marching through Greece, the Athenians sent envoys to Delphi in near panic. The Oracle’s response was rather cryptic: she said that “the wooden wall alone shall not fall” and would protect Athens. … (Philosophy Now)

Forget Stoicism, Skepticism is the ancient philosophy we need today. If you haven’t read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, you’ve certainly heard of them — if not in school, then on Instagram, TikTok, or a podcast. Composed by the second-century Roman emperor in his tent on nights between long marches and bloody battles, they’re one of the foundational texts of Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that first emerged around 300 B.C., and which has recently found an unlikely second life on social media.

Stoicism’s modern-day resurgence has been traced back to viral marketing executive turned self-help author Ryan Holiday’s 2014 book The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, which introduced snippets of Meditations to professional athletes and Silicon Valley elite. Other books from Holiday — including The Daily Stoic, which spawned a popular newsletter of the same name — followed suit, as did numerous copycats. Finding audiences outside college campuses, new editions of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic and Epictetus’ Discourses also became bestsellers.

I am not surprised at Stoicism’s newfound popularity. A lot of Stoic ideas and ideals — including resilience in the face of seemingly unbearable hardship — emerged during times which, like our own, were marked by “chaos, turmoil, and major political and social changes.” When the world appears to fall apart, Stoicism promises a way to prevent yourself from falling apart with it.

But I also have a bone to pick with Stoicism, both the philosophy itself and its internet-age bastardization. That’s why, in my latest book, How to be a (Happy) Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life, I point readers to another ancient school of thought, one related to (yet not nearly as fashionable as) Stoicism, and which may be uniquely suited to deal with the problems we face today, both individually and as a society. … (BigThink)

Doubt, moral courage, and living without illusions. What does it mean to live well when certainty is unavailable?

Michael Shermer speaks with yours truly about moral character, ancient philosophy, and the difficult art of making decisions without easy answers. The conversation moves from Cicero and Stoicism to the legacy of the New Atheism, asking why rejecting religion is not the same as having a philosophy of life.

We discuss virtue ethics, moral dilemmas, effective altruism, faith, free will, democracy, human flourishing, and the uneasy relationship between facts and values.

From the trolley problem and Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment to the ethics of charity, the limits of utilitarian thinking, and the dangers of tribalism, this episode asks how we should act when rules fail, consequences are uncertain, and good intentions are not enough. … (Skeptic)

What Stoicism teaches us about Donald Trump, covid-19, and ghosts. I discuss Stoicism, its applicability to the world of modern politics, and even the possibility of ghosts existing.

What would Marcus Aurelius think of the modern political climate?

We tend to think of Stoicism as a philosophy of passive resignation -- but I argue that true agency requires recognising both the limits of our power and knowledge. For me, the Stoic dichotomy of control does not breed political helplessness, but actually equips us to combat systemic issues like climate change by focusing our energy on actionable steps.

A conversation with the Via Stoica. What does it mean to be both a Stoic and a skeptic?

In this episode of the Via Stoica Podcast, I return to discuss my new book How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: a guide to building a philosophy of life rooted in Stoic virtue and the ancient art of proportioning belief to evidence.

The discussion moves from the foundations of a philosophy of life to the ancient debate between the Stoics and the Academic Skeptics, and then to one of the most compelling figures in Western history: Marcus Tullius Cicero. Not a Stoic himself, but deeply shaped by Stoic ethics, Cicero lived through the fall of the Roman Republic, exile, personal grief, and death at the hands of Mark Antony’s soldiers. His life, I argue, is a model for holding strong convictions while remaining honestly uncertain about what you know and why.

The episode also explores how Skepticism is not the enemy of commitment but its most honest companion: that our beliefs should be proportioned to evidence, and that a life examined with intellectual humility is not weaker but more durable.