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. All articles linked below are free.
How to tell a joke with Cicero and Quintilian. I probably don’t need to remind my readers of the accomplishments of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE): public advocate, orator, senator, Consul, savior of the fatherland (pater patriae), philosopher, and occasional poet. But did you know he was also one of the two funniest men of antiquity?
At least, that’s what Macrobius (flourished around 400 CE) says in a literary dialogue entitled Saturnalia:
“The two most eloquent men that antiquity produced—the comedian Plautus and the orator Cicero—were also its two best at telling jokes. … Who doesn’t know that Cicero’s enemies routinely used to call him ‘the stand-up Consul’?” (2.1.10-12)
The stunning phrase “stand-up Consul” is in the original Latin: consularis scurra, and it meant what we mean today: a stand-up comedian! … (15 December 2023)
Facing old age and death: a study in contrasts. Aging and death have been on my mind more than usual, of late. Not because I’m particularly old, yet. Nor because I’m facing imminent demise, that I know of. Rather, I’ve been interacting on and off with two relatives, let’s call them Eda and Oddo (not their real names!). They have given me much to reflect on because they are both older than I am (and about the same age, Eda being a little older) and one of them, Oddo, is now facing a terminal illness. The way they have been reacting to the onset of old age and, in the case of Oddo, imminent death, is a study in very sharp contrasts that has given me much to think about. … (22 December 2023)
The story of Pseudo-Seneca. If you are interested in Stoicism you have likely heard of the story of the so-called “Pseudo-Seneca,” but just in case, here it is. Stoicism had ceased to be an independent school of philosophy in the ancient world well before the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. Some of the other schools lingered only a bit longer, until the Byzantine emperor Justinian I closed the last of them, the Academy in Athens, in 529. … (29 December 2023)
The Nazi problem, a Stoic take. Surprisingly, contemporary society seems to have a Nazi problem. I say surprisingly because you would think that, after World War II and the Holocaust, we would be done with that particular pernicious ideology. But, apparently, we are not. From time to time, over the past several decades, both Germany and Italy have seen the occasional resurgence of overtly Nazifascist movements, sometimes in the form of violent protests enacted by misguided young people, at other times in the guise of thinly veined attempts to reconstitute the Fascist party, as was the case for the Movimento Sociale Italiano in Italy. … (26 January 2024)
Interview with a Cynic. You may noticed that we live in a world of extreme consumerism, where economists are finally beginning to take seriously the problem posed by so-called “externalities,” that is the costs and deleterious effects associated with the production of human goods. There is much talk, nowadays, of growing food locally because of the environmental degradation caused by global trade. And we still struggle to recognize and ameliorate the suffering of countless human beings that are being exploited so that we can have our mostly useless stuff delivered at our doorstep, pronto. … (2 February 2024)