Personal Perspective: Critics accuse popular books on Stoicism of pandering to a general audience. But what's the harm of the public reading ideas about life and ethics?
. Some of these books might as well be Tony Robbins', he writes. And some are published by a business press. It does not help that we are kind of"flooded" by these Stoic books, with some selling upwards of 6 million copies.It can, of course, seem silly for books to address us all as if we are in the military, or recovering from time in it, as Athitakis points out. But some of the readers are.
Critiques like Athitakis’ usually suggest the same things. First, work for the general reader is unappealing . Second, unlike religious thought, modern Stoicism does not present a. And third, back when Athitakis found Stoicism engaging as a young man, it was translated from the Greek, and its lines were “rebarred with moral certainty.”give readers permission to use what they would like from it, instead of being very strict.
I wonder if we can usefully distinguish between types of moral certainty. If the ancient Stoics sounded firm about ethics, we might remember that they are firm in a special way. As philosophers developing an ethical theory, they did not speak in one voice or only in aphorisms. b) invited their work to be checked, both against other Stoics and against other schools of ethical thought
I do not see the popular books on Stoicism at odds with any of this. There are, of course, books interpreting and updating Stoicism written for philosophers where ethical theorizing is done explicitly.
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