Endure and Renounce: 81 Selected Essays on Stoicism

"There were two vices much blacker and more serious than the rest: lack of persistence and lack of self-control … Endure and Renounce." (Epictetus, Fragments 10)

What you are about to read or peruse is a collection from the first year my now archived blog, How To Be A Stoic (.org). The first post came out on 3 March 2015, and ever since I have used the blog as a sort of public diary tracking my explorations of Stoicism, both the ancient philosophy and its developing modern descendant, in terms of theory and especially of practice, which is what makes Stoicism so distinctive in the philosophical landscape. This booklet collects the best 84 of the essays published from the beginning of the blog through December 2015. I started practicing Stoicism on 4 October 2014, the first date that marks an entry in my evening philosophical diary. The reasons that brought me to begin this project are detailed in a New York Times article by the same title of the blog (and which is also the title of my book on Stoicism, published by Basic Books in 2017). I am not a scholar in ancient philosophy, and I don’t read ancient Greek (I do okay with Latin, though), so all the quotations I mention are from some of the best English translations available today. I do think, however, that my dual professional background in science (biology, to be specific) and philosophy puts me in a particularly interesting position to comment on Stoicism, a naturalistic philosophy that maintained that knowledge of what we today call the natural and social sciences is foundational to any understanding of ethics, the latter defined as the ancient Greco-Romans did: the study of how to live one’s life. I hope you enjoy this collection and it will help you in your own adventures in Stoicism.