From the archive

The Figs in Winter archive is deep, here are some choice bits

Figs in Winter now has several hundred articles on a wide range of topics, including various approaches to living a meaningful life (ethics), examinations of pseudoscientific claims (science), and essays on practical reasoning (logic). This occasional series is meant to remind my readers of some of this material for their enjoyment and use.

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There is no upside to anger. Anger is a big deal for the Stoics. Seneca wrote a whole book about it, and it is still just as good—if not better—than the advice you find on the anger management site of the American Psychological Association.

The basic idea is that anger is one of the pathē, or unhealthy emotions, as distinct from the eupatheiai, their healthy counterpart, an example of which would be love for the proper objects or people (like virtue, or your children). In Stoic psychology, what makes an emotion unhealthy is the fact that it overrides reason, and nothing does that to the degree of anger.

I have written about anger rom a Stoic perspective before, and my experience is that a good number of people get really angry when they read something like what you are about to read. So, be forewarned! … (9 February 2024)

The story of the pale Stoic in the storm. Fear is a basic human emotion. Or is it? It depends on what you mean by “fear.” Modern cognitive science recognizes two different forms of most basic emotions: a pre-cognitive and a cognitive one. In the case of fear, for instance, the pre-cognitive form consists in the feeling you get when an autonomic physiological response is initiated by situations your brain subconsciously recognizes as potentially dangerous. It’s that rush of adrenaline that poises you to act on the fight-or-flight response triggered by your sympathetic nervous system. We share such response with a lot of other animals, and it likely evolved by natural selection.

The cognitive version of fear either follows the fight-or-flight response, once you have had time to think things over, or is an independent, long-term psychological condition. An example of the first kind might be a fight-or-flight condition triggered, say, by suddenly seeing a snake in front of you. After a moment or two the cognitive component starts weaving stories in your conscious brain: “Oh my god, this thing is likely poisonous. It’s going to kill me!” But you have the option of articulating a different story: “Ah, I have read about snakes in this area, and they are usually not poisonous. Besides, the ranger at the entrance of the park has given me instructions on what to do in exactly this situation.” The first story is going to turn your autonomic fight-or-flight response into cognitive fear; the second story will counter it and allow you to deal rationally with the situation. … (23 February 2024)

It ain’t no fallacy: on living according to Nature. Sometimes I’m asked to provide a capsule version of Stoicism. Or a bumper sticker version. Or an elevator speech version. You know, the whole thing in a nutshell. The bottom line. It’s incredible how many phrases American English has for “simplify to the essence.” Except that sometimes things are just a bit too complicated to be written out on a bumper sticker or explained during an elevator ride.

“Live according to Nature” is one such thing. It is, Diogenes Laertius tells us, the standard motto of the Stoic school:

“Zeno … said that the goal is to live in harmony with Nature, which means to live according to virtue; for Nature leads us to virtue.” (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.87)

This, in my experience, is both one of the most powerful and most easily misunderstood concepts of Stoicism. Even many who practice Stoic philosophy don’t seem to quite get it. I’ve written about it in the past, but let me try again, from a different angle. … (1 March 2024)

Virtue ethics, rules, and consequences. What does it mean to be ethical? There are three major frameworks to answer that question: deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics.

(In the following I will use the words ethics and morality interchangeably, since “ethics” comes from the Greek ēthos, meaning either character or custom, a word that Cicero, in De Fato 2.1, translated into Latin as moralis, meaning proper behavior as well as, again, custom.)

Virtue ethics was developed by Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, and a number of other Hellenistic schools of thought. It is, arguably (but debatably) also present in some form in Eastern traditions like Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. If so, virtue ethics is one of the dominant ways to think about morality, particularly after the so-called “aretaic turn” (from arete, meaning virtue) in contemporary moral philosophy, which is usually traced to the publication of Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy.” … (27 March 2024)

Why the Greco-Romans? Why on earth did I end up devoting so much time of my life to the ancient Greco-Romans? Some would say that this was the predictable endpoint of a trend. After all, my first academic career was in science (evolutionary biology), which is “obviously” useful. Then I moved to philosophy, the equally obvious epitome of a useless field, they say. But at least I was doing philosophy of science, which didn’t remove me too much from what the truly important stuff. Then I discovered Stoicism and now not only my academic job, but also my outreach efforts and even my personal life are devoted to utterly useless things put forth by dead white men who lived two millennia ago or thereabout.

Well, to begin with, though the Greco-Romans are all definitely dead, and most of them were men (with several remarkable exceptions), they were definitely not “white.” But that’s a story for another day. What I want to explore here is why, exactly, do I and so many others think that it is not a waste of time to reflect on the Greco-Romans. On the contrary, it is one of the most useful things we could be doing. … (17 April 2024)