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A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

philosophy-of-cbt.com

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Re: A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

#31

Post by solutionscbt »

Evbn wrote: post #23
umbrella wrote: post #15

-Contemplation of Death: Contemplate your own death regularly, the deaths of loved ones and even the demise of the universe itself. Mission Accomplished.

Wait, the quoted text is considered advice? Ugh.

No, it's not advice. It's an item from a bullet-point list of contemplative exercises found in traditional Stoicism and other Socratic philosophies. The meditation on death (melete thanatou) was mentioned by Socrates as an integral part of his approach to philosophy, according to Plato and it's common to many other philosophical and spiritual traditions, even Eastern approaches such as Buddhism. You'd need to read the literature to understand the concept of the exercise, although that doesn't necessarily mean you'd agree with it you won't get a reasonable idea of what it's about just from that one sentence description, and that's not what it's meant for anyway. Still not everyone's cup of tea, though.

Re: A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

#32

Post by solutionscbt »

10dpd wrote: post #3

Even shorter list: 1. Plan your day. 2. Execute on the plan 3. Review and score how it went.

Hmm... Might be good advice. That's just the format or structure used to explain the exercise minus any content, though: a beginning, middle, and end. The actual content in my article is the practice of a form of mindfulness based on the central precept of Stoicism. In other words, you've missed out the "Stoic" part.

Re: A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

#34

Post by solutionscbt »

On the same site as this article you can also complete a "Stoic Attitudes Scale" that we've been developing in collaboration with a team of psychologists and academics linked to the research on Stoicism at Exeter University:

http://philosophy-of-cbt.com/complete-online-survey-the-stoi...

About 100 people have done it so far but at this stage we're just collecting feedback on the concepts included for incorporation into a revised design. The feedback has been that people have found it really interesting and useful, though. Feel free to check it out, you can still complete it online.

Regards,

Donald Robertson

Re: A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

#35

Post by snth »

kingmanaz wrote: post #26
igravious wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The appeal to progress is just as much a fallacy as the appeal to tradition. And what if the spirit of man is shaped by his technology and culture? > Atheism is a closed-minded agnosticism. Ouch. There are no compelling reasons to believe in a god or gods. Atheism is the rational response to this state of affairs. Agnosticism is for the weak.

>what if the spirit of man is shaped by his technology What if it isn't? Man no longer wars with trebuchets. Does that mean that the nature of man has changed? Similarly, man will someday set aside personal computers for something else. Does that mean that the nature of man will again change? A man's tools are not his nature, rather, nature is known through man's acts. Such acts are exampled in works such as Plutarch…

We're veering pretty far off topic here, but consider that, rather than attacking atheists or agnostics, we should just be more precise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_theistic_probabili...

Re: A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

#37

Post by lhnz »

robertk wrote: post #10
BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hence, they are not doing evil while thinking "Ha ha ha, I'm so evil", but genuinely believe they are doing good. This is still just as naive, in my opinion. There are plenty of people who knowingly trample others to advance their own selfish goals, who know that it's unfair, and who sincerely don't care.

Yes, but the point is they do not do evil knowingly, in the sense of comprehending how the nature of their soul came about and determining this is the best course of action under reflection over the space of all possible minds; the evolutionary process endowed them with a cognitive structure that primes them to think that way, and we should mourn the deterministic necessity of them spending time living in that mind a…

Why exactly would you not want to condemn them or call them evil if they are doing things which we believe are bad for society?

Is it not a useful judgment?

Re: A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

#38

Post by michaelsbradley »

jacoblyles wrote: post #24
guylhem wrote: post #2

Shorter list : - Read the "Epistulæ Morales ad Lucilium" from Seneca - Read the "Bhagavad Gita" to avoid being stuck in a given interpretation. - Shy away from religion. Find the truth by yourself And therefore make your own list of how to live your day. Feeling grateful and trying to see the lord in every being you encounter, friend or foe, is is mine. Also "no man does evil knowingly" seems wrong - sorry, but a tin…

Religion has the great advantage of being practiced in community. It may not have the pure wisdom of Seneca, but what good it can offer is more likely to stick. Unfortunately, the Christian community offers more social capital than the Stoic or the atheist in the west.

Fr. Alphonsus Rodriguez, S.J.[1] (d. 1616) has sometimes been called a "Christian Seneca".[2]

I had never heard of him or his major work "Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues" until 2004, when someone I met on a retreat recommended that I hunt down a copy of Joseph Rickaby's[3] masterful translation from the original Spanish.[4][5]

I had the opportunity to read through "PPCV" over the period of about a year back in 2007-2008, and I can only say that it leaves a remarkable and lasting impression. I would think his treatises on humility, examination of conscience, and mental prayer (meditation) would be of great interest even to those who aren't particularly religious -- i.e. the practical wisdom contained therein is like a toolkit for coming to "know oneself" for true.

[1] http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Alonso_Rodriguez

[2] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2540029

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rickaby

[4] http://bit.ly/PPCV-1of2

[5] http://bit.ly/PPCV-2of2

Re: A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

#39

Post by tedks »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #9
blowski wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also "no man does evil knowingly" seems wrong - sorry, but a tiny minority of people really want to see the world burn. I think the point is that those people believe the world deserves to burn, or that by burning, it would be a better place. Hence, they are not doing evil while thinking "Ha ha ha, I'm so evil", but genuinely believe they are doing good. > Shy away from religion. Find the truth by yourself. You can…

> Hence, they are not doing evil while thinking "Ha ha ha, I'm so evil", but genuinely believe they are doing good. This is still just as naive, in my opinion. There are plenty of people who knowingly trample others to advance their own selfish goals, who know that it's unfair, and who sincerely don't care.

In general, you can fit the motivations for evil into one of four categories: there's evil for instrumental reasons, evil for ideological reasons, evil as a result of threatened egotism, and evil as a result of pure sadism.

There are some genuinely sadistic people, but they tend to be few and far between, to the point where once we find one of them, they spawn books and movies and huge long wikipedia pages.

There are plenty of people that will trample others to advance their own selfish goals. They know that they're doing something wrong, but they feel they need to in that circumstance, or are just willing to do that.

Then there are people who are genuinely thinking that they're doing good, and that the world will be a better place after they do whatever evil thing they do. In this context it's better to think of evil as a social concept rather than a personal one, because these people don't actually think they're doing something evil in a long-term context-included sense.

I think conflation between some of the above types of evil is causing a lot of needless dispute in this thread.

(This is mostly from the Baumeister chapter in The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, which is a very well-edited collection of notable psychologists discussing this very topic, and I highly recommend it.)

Re: A Simplified Modern Approach to Stoicism

#40

Post by barry-cotter »

onno wrote: post #29
cwp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. If you want to be a politician in the West, you can't really avoid participating in a Christian community of one kind or another. But people who are interested in stoicism probably have other goals.

This is true only in America, or maybe in the "Anglosaxon" world in general, but certainly not in Europe.

It isn't true of Ireland, Britain, Australia or New Zealand. I don't think it's true of Canada. Among WEIRD [0] nations I think the US is the only one where being openly atheistic would abort any serious political career.

[0]Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democracies

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