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Lawrence Becker (1938–2018) and how to live a meaningful life against the odds
Prof. Lawrence Becker, the author of A New Stoicism, passed away last year. I met Larry in early 2016, right at the beginning of my sabbatical leave that resulted in the writing of How to Be a Stoic, my first book on Stoicism. I had heard of Larry because my friend Greg Lopez organized several months worth of discussions of A New Stoicism for his New York City Stoics meetup. It’s a hard book to read, if you don’t have any background in philosophy (I mean, it’s got lengthy commentaries after most chapters, not to mention an appendix containing a calculus for normative logic). That is why, under Larry’s supervision, I wrote a 10-part commentary of the entire book for the layperson.
The basic info about Larry as a philosopher is nicely summarized in a brief obituary that appeared in Daily Nous: PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1965, taught at Hollins College, VA, until 1989, then William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in the Humanities as well as Professor of Philosophy at the College of William and Mary, where he retired in 2001.
Larry didn’t write just about Stoicism, though A New Stoicism is a landmark that has helped immensely to both put modern Stoicism on the map and update the philosophy in a creative and yet philosophically rigorous way. He was also interested in the concept of reciprocity; wrote on habilitation, health, and agency; on the justification of moral rights; on discrimination, bioethics, and public policy; and on property rights. Together with his loving wife, Charlotte B. Becker, Larry edited the monumental (2,020 pages…) Encyclopedia of Ethics for Routledge.
But here I want to tell a more personal, and yet profoundly philosophical, story about Larry Becker. Reading A New Stoic I had immediately realized that he was a serious student of the philosophy, of course. But it soon turned out that I had no clue as to just how seriously! By chance I discovered that my friend and colleague Nick Pappas at the City College of New York, who is an ancient philosophy scholar (see this excellent essay of his in the NYT), was a good friend and former colleague of Larry. So I asked Nick if he could “introduce” us via email.
An interesting correspondence ensued, which eventually led to the idea of actually…
