Quote of the day

"Ancient philosophers believed achieving ataraxia created an emotional homeostasis, where the effect wouldn't just be a more stable base-level mood, but one that would, they hoped, flow out to the people around you." - Brigid Delaney, Reasons Not to Worry: How to be a Stoic in Chaotic Times: A Practical Guide to Stoicism for Self-Improvement and Personal Growth

Delaney defines in the preceding passage ataraxia as "a lucid state of robust equanimity characterized by ongoing freedom from distress and worry."

Quote of the day

 "Don't take yourself too seriously. People who cannot laugh at themselves become laughable." - Julian Baggini, How to Think like a Philosopher: Twelve Key Principles for More Humane, Balanced, and Rational Thinking

Quote of the day

 "I reread a great deal, but have lost count only with Dickens, Tolstoy, and Tolkien." - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy

Quote of the day

 "There is value in a single step toward justice, and one step leads to another." - Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Quote of the day

 "In the Republic, Plato argued that there is no prospect of psychic health without a kind of justice in the soul, and that we cannot be unjust to others if we're just within ourselves." - Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Quote of the day

 "Remember Phil Connors [from the film Groundhog Day], trapped in a temporal loop. What liberates him is only in part his orientation to the process; it's also his selflessness, his love and respect for others. Is there a lesson there for us?"- Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Quote of the day

"From Alexander the Platonist: that we should not often or without due necessity either say to anyone or write in a letter, 'I am too busy,' nor in this way should we constantly try to evade the obligations imposed on us by our social relationships by pleading the excuse of urgent business." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

This advice from nearly two thousand years ago has certainly held up well and is as relevant as ever.

Quote of the day

 "[I]n many traditions mental preparation has been a core intellectual exercise. For instance, the great Confucian philosopher of the Song Dynasty, Zhu Xi, wrote that 'if you want to read books, you must first settle the mind to make it like still water or a clear mirror.'" - Julian Baggini, How to Think like a Philosopher: Twelve Key Principles for More Humane, Balanced, and Rational Thinking

Quote of the day

 "Let it be impossible for anyone to say of you truthfully that you are not sincere, that you are not a good man; rather let him be a liar who supposes any such thing of you. And this is wholly within your power: for what can prevent you from being good and sincere?" - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Quote of the day

 "It is as though we are so attached to how things seem superficially that we are unable to see how they really are, even when it only takes careful attending to reveal the truth." - Julian Baggini, How to Think like a Philosopher: Twelve Key Principles for More Humane, Balanced, and Rational Thinking

Quote of the day

 "We seek to emulate the best without any illusion that we can equal them, just with the more realistic hope that we can become the best versions of ourselves." -  Julian Baggini, How to Think like a Philosopher: Twelve Key Principles for More Humane, Balanced, and Rational Thinking

Quote of the day

 "The entirety of hell is contained in one word: solitude." - Victor Hugo

Via Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya

Quote of the day

 "Respect, compassion, and love are all ways of asserting that someone matters. They are melodies sung in the same key." - Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Quote of the day

 "A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer." - David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40)

Via Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya

Quote of the day

 "We have to live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be." - Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Quote of the day

 "We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both." - Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (And Two-Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life

Quote of the day

 "Never call yourself a philosopher, and don't talk among laymen for the most part about philosophical principles,  but act in accordance with those principles ... And accordingly, if any talk should arise among laymen about some philosophical principle, keep silent for the most part, for there is a great danger that you'll simply vomit up what you haven't properly digested ... For sheep, too, don't vomit up their fodder to show the shepherds how much they've eaten, but digest their food inside them, and produce wool and milk on the outside. And so you likewise shouldn't show off your principles to laymen, but rather show them the actions that result from those principles when they've been properly digested." - Epictetus, Handbook

In other words: don't talk your philosophy, embody it. Live it.

Quote of the day

 "[W]hile the unjust may be happy, they do not live well." - Kieran Setiya, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Baleful quote of the day

 "If you think social media platforms are already doing all they can to avoid the victimization and exploitation of their most vulnerable users, you need to think again." - Laura Bates, Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How it Affects Us All

A thought experiment

 A few months ago I began to draft a post in which I challenged myself to list the the character traits a role model would have, after which I was going to note that Donald Trump is almost the complete antithesis of everything I think an admirable person would be. I got this far:

List the qualities that you find admirable for a person to have. 

For me: confidence humility kindness generosity intelligence discipline temperance honesty decency virtuous

If you were to build a person from scratch who did

I had intended to return to the draft and finish, but having come across this reposted essay from a few years ago, I think this already says everything I might have thought to have written.

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace

One thing I might still note, however, is that some people might see my list and say that Trump does, in fact, have a great deal of confidence. I beg to differ. My conception of confidence is Stoic: it is inwardly focused self-awareness that can not be affected by external circumstances. Trump does not have this: he has arrogance (false confidence) - and much of it.

Quote of the day

 "In the constitution of a rational creature I see no virtue that pits itself against justice; but I see one that can pit itself against pleasure: self-control." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Quote of the day

 "No one grows tired of receiving benefits, and to bestow benefits is to act according to nature; so never grow tired of receiving benefits by bestowing benefits on others." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

In other words: helping people is human nature and so we help ourselves when we help others. Or, as Seneca put it: "You must live for another if you would live for yourself."

Quote of the day

 "Pride's greatest secret is that it is always under threat." - Sabrina B. Little, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners

Quote of the day

"The word compete means 'strive together' or 'strive in common.' It is a concept that is more collaborative than antagonistic, but this is not the sense we get when the word is used today." - Sabrina B. Little, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners

Quote of the day

 "Here is a running tip: You can't feel grateful and bad for yourself at the same time. Gratitude decreases negative affect." - Sabrina B. Little, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners

Quote of the day

 "There is clear guidance for how to develop a good character, and it is guidance that will especially resonate with an athlete: We develop good characters in the same way that we become better runners. We practice." - Sabrina B. Little, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners

Quote of the day

 "Adapt yourself to the circumstances in which your lot has cast you; and love these people among whom your lot has fallen, but love them in all sincerity." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Quote of the day

"We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest." - Russell-Einstein Manifesto (July 9, 1955)

This was in reference to the prospect of nuclear war between nations, but as more and more citizens see each other as enemies and the fabric of American democracy seems to be unraveling, I'm finding this message Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell gave us particularly poignant.

Quote of the day

 "We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world." - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Quote of the day

 "History has a lot to teach us, but only if we are willing to listen and learn. If we see the same sort of things taking place now that happened in the past, including drought and famine, earthquakes and tsunamis, then I ask again, might it not be a good idea to look at the ancient world and learn from what happened to them?" - Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

Quote of the day

 "[S]he changed her mind on a number of issues (e.g., using or refusing to use certain pronouns, and the significance thereof), and some of the things she once said she later preferred to say differently. And so she corrects herself, pushes herself, forgives herself - this is what a living understanding looks like, instead of dead dogma. We should all be so willing to collaborate with our old selves throughout our life journey." - Ken Liu, describing Ursula K. Le Guin in his introduction to her The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction and Fantasy

Quote of the day

 "They do not come to you, the objects whose pursuit or avoidance causes you such disquiet, but in a certain sense you go to them; so if you will only let your judgement about them remain at rest, they too will remain unmoved, and you will be seen neither to pursue them nor to avoid them." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

In other words, things/people do not force us to think or feel a certain way, it is our own judgements and thoughts about them that cause our distress - we do it to ourselves. Marcus is telling himself that if he doesn't form, accept or fixate on such thoughts in the first place the distress will not come; so don't go to those thoughts in your mind.

Thought of the day

 The most important word in the English language: equanimity.

Quote of the day

 "What the idea of 'doing one's moral best' comes down to, when it is sincere and genuine, is something close to Aristotle's idea that, in effect, one lives an ethically good life by trying to do so. The trying is itself the succeeding" - A.C. Grayling, Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life

Quote of the day

 "The rightful first subject of skepticism isn't others. It's ourselves." - Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

Quote of the day

 "So after you work a lifetime to get yourself all set up and then delude yourself into thinking that you have some kind of ownership claim on your station in life, you're riding for a fall. You're asking for disappointment. To avoid that, stop kidding yourself, just do the best you can on a commonsense basis to make your station in life what you want it to be, but never get hooked on it. Make sure in your heart of hearts, in your inner self, that you treat your station in life with indifference. Not with contempt, only with indifference." - James Stockdale, Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot

I can say from (current) experience this is very good advice as your station in life is something that you can influence, but it is subject to vast other influences that are beyond your control, rendering itself beyond your own control. "What are we to do, then? To make the best of what lies within our power, and deal with everything else as it comes."*

*Epictetus, Discourses 1.1.17

Quote of the day

 "[Socrates] was ... the first to show that life affords scope for philosophy at every moment, in every detail, in every feeling and circumstance whatsoever." - Plutarch, "On Old Men in Public Life"

Via The Socratic Method: A Practioner's Handbook by Ward Farnsworth

Quote of the day

 "To the Stoic, the greatest injury that can be inflicted on a person is administered by himself when he destroys the good man within him. For the non-Stoics, almost all great injuries are based on deprivations of 'things' controlled by external persons or forces. To a Stoic, there is no such things as being a 'victim'; you can  only be a 'victim' of yourself." - James Stockdale, Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot

Crossing the Rubicon

 I wake up today feeling the same. Except not. It has unofficially been the case for decades now that the President is above the law, as we have "looked forward, not backward" at crimes committed in office. But now we have the Supreme Court giving the presidency "absolute immunity" to commit crimes while in office. In a country where one person is set above the law we are all less safe, less free. So much for the Jeffersonian sentiment: "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

This 4th of July we should not celebrate our liberty, but mourn its loss.

Baleful quotes of the day

 "Surveillance capitalists work hard to camouflage their purpose as they master the uses of instrumentation power to shape our behavior while evading our awareness." - Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

"I want you to imagine walking into a control room with a hundred people, hunched over a desk with little dials, and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists right now, today." - Tristan Harris, "How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day"*

*Via Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading by Chris Anderson

Quote of the day

 "A person often acts unjustly by what he fails to do, and not only by what he does." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Wrong even while being wrong

I'm watching rally footage of Donald Trump and I can't believe the staggering amount of falseness that he generates, almost constantly. Particularly struck that even within the realm of his misinformation, he misinforms about that: he is saying that global cooling, fear the Earth would freeze was once a supposed problem in the .... 1920s. And that there was a Time magazine cover about it.

Global cooling scare is a standard climate change denier trope: it was a Newsweek article that is the source of this myth, and it was during the 1970s, not 20s. 

There was no consensus of impending global cooling in the 1970s, nor a panic. The majority of research papers were concerned with global warming, even then. And the Time magazine cover allusion is reference to a fraud generated by a climate denier.

Yet how many people in that rally audience will ever be confronted with this information? 

Baleful quote of the day

"I can't call these things social networks anymore. I call them behavior modification empires." - Jaron Lanier 

 Via Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading by Chris Anderson

Quote of the day

 "Whoever does wrong, wrongs himself; whoever acts unjustly, acts unjustly towards himself because he makes himself bad." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Quote of the day

"[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much, soon to forget it. Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?" - James Madison, "Memorial and Remonstrance" (1785)

Quote of the day

 "[Scientific thinking's] strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. This awareness allows us to keep questioning our own knowledge, and thus, to continue learning." - Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

I actually prefer the title the book was originally released with (that edition is now out of print): The First Scientist: Anaximander and his Legacy.

Baleful quote of the day

"Over the past two decades, influential figures in American and British public life have adopted an ever-more-tenuous connection to the truth - and a complete disregard for evidence, expert knowledge, or logical coherence - with no political consequences." - Cailin O'Connor & James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

Quote of the day

 "[W]e are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers from Ptahhotep to Sartre

This is Durant explaining Aristotle's conception of excellence of character.

Quote of the day

 'The first great distinction of Aristotle is that almost without predecessors, almost entirely by his own hard thinking, he created a new science - Logic." - Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers from Ptahhotep to Sartre

Quote of the day

 "It is unjust to complain that what may happen to anyone has happened to someone." - Montaigne, "Of Experience" (1580)

Via The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual by Ward Farnsworth

In other words, there is no point in moaning, "why me?" when something we prefer not to happen has happened to us.