Not to Worry

Stephen Mulhall

  • Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties and Fate by Tad Brennan
    Oxford, 340 pp, £25.00, June 2005, ISBN 0 19 925626 8

Why should we take anything other than an antiquarian interest in the doctrinal intricacies of a school of Ancient Greek ethical thought that passed its zenith in 200 AD? The dust-jacket copy on Tad Brennan’s book claims that it will explain not only how to live the Stoic life, but also why we might want to, the reason being that Stoic ideas remain valuable today, both intellectually and in practice. In fact, while Brennan certainly works hard to render Stoicism intelligible, he ends up identifying various ways in which its vision of human nature is either unintelligible, or a source of damaging misunderstandings about ourselves that continue to inform our thinking.

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Vol. 28 No. 18 · 21 September 2006 » Stephen Mulhall » Not to Worry (print version)
Pages 23-24 | 3109 words