All Articles and Essays
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In Defence of Stoic Physics
14 November 2025The Greek four elements as phase states—solid, liquid, gas, plasma—and why Stoic physics still maps onto empirical observation of matter.
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James Daltrey on Stoicism, Determinism and Fate
24 February 2025Keith P. Myers on why calling the Stoics ‘determinists’ misses the point: they denied abstract laws, so modern determinism does not fit Stoic physics or fate.
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James Daltrey on Virtue & the use of Indifferents
29 January 2025Keith Myers on Stoic indifferents: externals are the material virtue works on—no marble, no sculpture; virtue is skilled use of what lies outside us.
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Epictetus: Discourse 1.1: On What is Eph’Hemin.
25 May 2024Epictetus Discourse 1.1 on what is eph’hemin: reading the Enchiridion’s opening through the fuller argument in the Discourses compiled by Arrian.
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Socrates don’t kno nuffink
3 April 2024Why ‘I know that I know nothing’ is a modern paraphrase—and what Plato’s Socrates actually claimed about wisdom, ignorance, and the Delphic oracle.
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Off the cuff comments on the discussion of Providence or Atoms in Marcus Aurelius
30 March 2024Notes on Marcus Aurelius’s ‘providence or atoms’: Stoic physics, providence as causal order, and what the atomic alternative really means.
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Stoic Cosmology and Ethics
19 May 2023How Stoic ethics grows from their cosmology: humans as social, language-using animals seeking what benefits themselves and the common good.
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The Scientific God of the Stoics
17 May 2023A Side View reply: why the Stoic god is a scientific, naturalistic cosmology—not mysticism incompatible with modern physics and biology.
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What is Controlling What?
13 May 2023The Stoic Dichotomy of Control is a modern invention that fails to understand and completely distorts the actual message of Epictetus.
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The Enchiridion, Or Manual, Of Epictetus by Elizabeth Carter (1758)
12 May 2023Elizabeth Carter’s authentic 1758 Enchiridion—not the popular internet misattribution—beginning ‘Of things, some are in our power and others not.’
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The Handpage to the Handbook of Epictetus
11 May 2023A handpage to Epictetus’s Handbook: living well through understanding Nature, the right use of externals, and the pursuit of arete (virtue).
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Some things are what? What does the beginning of the Enchiridion mean?
10 May 2023A close reading of Epictetus’s Enchiridion: why this ‘introductory’ text is advanced, and what ‘up to us’ really means in practice.