Psychological research is supposed to be helpful to living a better life. In that sense, it is the empirical complement to philosophy as the art of living. As the ancient Stoics taught us, it makes little sense to try to live a good life if you ignore how the world works (science), or if you do not think in a sound manner about what to do and why (philosophy).

One very nice example is the use of so-called implementation intentions for Stoic practice, as my friend and co-worker Greg Lopez and I have done throughout our Handbook for New Stoics…

Injustice is, and has always been, a plague on the human condition. Over time, we have invented the concept of rights in an attempt to curtail such a plague. But there can be such thing as frivolous rights as well as frivolous talk about injustice. This article is about one example of the latter.

In a guest post at Practical Ethics, Oxford student Brian Wong argues that academic philosophers ought to write more accessibly, on penalty of perpetrating a new kind of hitherto unrecognized injustice: “respondent injustice.” What is he talking about?

Wong begins reasonably enough, by stating that philosophy…

B. writes: Just finished Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and I have been pondering the following: for the Stoics, virtue is the only thing that matters. At the end of the day, even life itself is a preferred indifferent. But when I think about Frankl’s description of life in Auschwitz, it becomes clear that every minute of every day involved a struggle to survive, which inevitably entailed making moral compromises, both large and small. It seems clear that the only people to have survived were those who were both very lucky and made such compromises. I think this is…

I discovered Stoicism as recently as 2014. On September 5th, to be precise, because of this tweet. Of course, I had read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations back in college, and had translated some Seneca from Latin in high school. But somehow I never actually associated either one of them with a sophisticated, coherent philosophy, or even realized that they were talking about the very same approach to living a good life.

What brought me to Stoicism was a midlife crisis. Nothing terrible. The usual things: a (unexpected) divorce, the death of my father, a new job, and moving to a different…

We need virtue ethics. That’s the bottom line of an article by Martin Butler, who argues that we should teach virtue ethics to our kids and to ourselves. He observes that a lot of contemporary discussions about ethics induce, especially in young people, what he terms “a kind of paralysis of neutralism, a kind of ‘some people say this and others say that,’” which is detrimental to our moral development as individuals, as well as to social and political discourse. (See here for my handy guide to talking your friends out of moral relativism.)

Butler also points out that, while…

I’ve read a large number of technical papers in both science and philosophy during my career, and I’ve written a decent quantity myself (so far, 89 in science and 92 in philosophy). It’s rare that a new paper grabs my attention to the point of thinking, “I really need to write about this, more people ought to be aware of it.” And yet, one such paper came across my iPad recently: Bullshit, Pseudoscience and Pseudophilosophy, by Victor Moberger, at Stockholm University in Sweden (published in Theoria, October 2020).

I have been interested in pseudoscience for a long time, and specifically…

G. writes: How should Stoics view those born with several developmental defects? My instinctive response is that the moral answer is with humanity and compassion, but I have trouble reaching that conclusion using a Stoic framework. From my readings, so many of Stoicism’s ideas of humanity are wrapped up in notions of intellect and the capacity for reason (e.g., even those suffering from “madness” are still members of the humanity family, only incapable of using reason effectively). But if a person, through accident of birth, fundamentally lacks that capacity, what basis do we have to treat them as a human…

Epictetus is one of the most influential of Stoic philosophers, if unfortunately not any longer a household name. He was well recognized throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and several of America’s founding fathers had a personal copy of his Enchiridion. Nowadays, however, unless you are into Stoicism, you’ve likely never heard of Epictetus. Heck, I went through an entire graduate program in philosophy, including courses on ancient philosophy, and never heard of him ether. …