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Interesting that nobody seems to have had anything particularly worth writing on the subject of stoicism for the past nearly-2000 years.
by hugh4 11y ago
Interesting that nobody seems to have had anything particularly worth writing on the subject of stoicism for the past nearly-2000 years.
- fluidcruft 11y agoStoicism is a secular buddhism for people that don't like the buddhist brand.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mhartl 11y agoOr, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it in Antifragile: "A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude."
- viewer5 11y agoWhy "with attitude"?
- mhartl 11y agoI can't be 100% sure what Taleb had in mind, but I think the idea is that Stoics are a little more defiant than Buddhists, whose reputation is more for passivity. In fact I truncated the quote, both for brevity and because I don't like Taleb's self-censorship, but the original reads as follows: A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says "f*** you" to fate. (asterisks in original).
- VLM 11y agoHuman condition writing like philosophy and religion formation peaked about two millennia ago. Once its figured out, there isn't too much new to say, unlike, say, technology or fashion. You can write a popularization or translation once in awhile. An eternity of profitable textbooks are possible, just like mathematics. If you'd like a vision into what Moores Law or computer science will look like in 2000 years, you could do worse than comparing to the humanities peaking 2000 years ago. In 2000 years there will be academic disciples reading Knuth and the lambda-ites will continually be having "revival" journalist articles written about them every couple years and their heretical un-natural love of parenthesis. It would be interesting to argue that position against something like geometry where at the entry level there really isn't much new beyond Euclid however at the higher end there has been progress and at the low end modern textbooks don't resemble "The Elements" very closely even if conceptually there is nothing new. Strong fact based arguments could be made either way. Halting-problem-like, the most effective way to figure it out will probably be to wait 2000 years and see what happens.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- humanrebar 11y agoMany places in the gospels and epistles in the Bible are directly addressing stoicism. Granted, those were also written about 2000 years ago. But people today write and talk about Philippians 4 all the time.