In this podcast episode, host Fasci Carmenicus interviews Dr. John Sellers, a philosophy lecturer and expert in ancient philosophy, particularly Stoicism. They discuss the wisdom of Stoicism and how it can enhance our lives. Dr. Sellers is the author of "Lessons in Stoicism," a practical guide on applying Stoic principles. They also touch on other philosophies like Epicureanism and Skepticism. Dr. Sellers shares his experience setting up Modern Stoicism, which runs Stoic Week, a program that tests the practical benefits of Stoic ideas. He explains techniques like cognitive distancing and the premeditation of future evils. The conversation highlights the works of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus as great starting points for those interested in exploring Stoicism.
Hello everyone, and welcome to Artidote podcast, where I, Fasci Carmenicus, ask questions to best-selling non-fiction authors about their books and ideas. My guest today is Dr. John Sellers, who is a lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London, and is a leading expert in ancient philosophy, with a particular focus on Stoicism. In this interview, we are going to explore the ancient wisdom of Stoicism, and how it can help us lead a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
Dr. Sellers is the author of Lessons in Stoicism, a practical guide that offers timeless advice on how to apply Stoic principles to our everyday lives. But we won't stop there, we'll also delve into other schools of philosophy, such as Epicureanism and Skepticism, and discuss how their teachings can help us achieve true happiness and tranquility. In February 2023, Dr. Sellers published a new book on Aristotle, which is also full of interesting and practical ideas that can improve our lives.
So, whether you are already familiar with Stoic teachings, or just curious about philosophy, get ready for a truly inspiring and thought-provoking conversation with one of the leading experts in the field. I hope you'll enjoy listening to my conversation with Dr. John Sellers. Dr. Sellers, thank you so much for coming to my podcast. I'm so excited to record this episode. There are so many questions that my readers have sent me after I shared your wonderful book. Excited to explore Stoicism, Epicureanism, I assume, and Aristotle's ideas in this episode.
To begin with, I would like to ask you, could you please tell a little bit about yourself? Yeah, sure. Thanks for inviting me to come along. My name is John Sellers. I teach philosophy in the University of London, and I'm just a regular academic. I went to university to study philosophy about 30 years ago and have been doing so ever since. I started to get interested in ancient philosophy quite early on, I think, and in particular Stoicism.
I wrote my doctoral thesis on Stoicism, and that was about 20 years ago. About 10 years ago, with a group of other people, I was involved in setting up the organization that's now known as Modern Stoicism that runs Stoic Week. Over the last 10 years or so, we've been doing that as well. There are two interesting things that you said. First of all, that you had a PhD thesis on Stoicism. Could you please tell a little bit about your thesis? What was it about? Why did you decide to focus your studies on Stoicism? Yes.
So, I mean, the thesis was really the foundation for what became my first book, which is called The Art of Living. So it's out there, and people can find it if they're curious. I mean, I suppose the motivation was this. At a fairly key point in the 1990s, I came across Pierre Hadot's book called Philosophy as a Way of Life, which I found really inspiring and important. But I was left with a slightly strange feeling of, OK, so what does Philosophy as a Way of Life actually mean? How do we kind of pin down a more precise definition? I was also reading at the same time some work by Michel Foucault, who had been inspired by Pierre Hadot.
And he used to talk about care of the self. And this looked like a connected term, but it wasn't quite clear what that meant either. And so I really wanted to get a sense of, OK, what did the ancient philosophers themselves actually think they thought Philosophy was? And so I wanted to go and dig back through the ancient material. And the one phrase that came up more than anything else was the art of living. This was a phrase that the ancient Stoics actually used, and that some of the other sources discussed.
So I really wanted to get an idea of what did the Stoics think Philosophy was? And that was really the focus of the thesis around this concept of an art, an art or craft, a skill about how to live well. That's really interesting. So it's a book that the art of living was kind of the consequence of your PhD thesis. And it is still available. So our listeners, including myself, can go and find it and read it.
Yes, that's right. You also mentioned about the that you set up the modern Stoicism convention. Could you tell a little bit about that project as well? What does it include? What is it about? Sure. So, I mean, the driving force behind this when it started was Professor Christopher Gill, who is down in the University of Exeter, and he brought together a group of people who he thought might have interests in thinking about how Stoicism could be useful for people today.
And so that included me, because I already knew him, Donald Robertson, Tim Le Bon, and a number of other people. And we had a kind of a brainstorming meeting where we wanted to think about it wasn't so much about bringing Stoic ideas to a wide public. It was more about can we test any of these ancient Stoic ideas to see if they actually benefit people or not? So people like Seneca and Epictetus and others will say these Stoic ideas can really make help you to live well.
And so the academic question was, well, is that true? Does it actually work? Can we find a way to actually test these theories and this practical advice? And so it was with that thought in mind that we came up with the idea of Stoic Week, the thought that we would give people a series of practical exercises grown from ancient and see if it made any real difference to people and their psychological well-being. And so we had people fill in the series of questionnaires before they started and then fill in the same set of questionnaires after to see if their sense of well-being had shifted in any way.
And so we kind of pushed and advertised this in order to get loads of people that would come along and be part of our experiment. And we've done that every year now for 10, 11 years, I guess. And after a while, it became fairly clear that this was consistently benefiting people. And so when we felt really confident that people were actually gaining some benefit from these Stoic ideas, and as importantly, that no one was really getting hurt either.
No one reported any negative or adverse experience from trying to live like a Stoic, even if they decided Stoicism wasn't for them. No one came off worse, which was really important to hear also. And so then it became much more about just really trying to bring these ideas to as many people as possible, because we were confident that these ideas could actually help people sometimes in very difficult situations. So Modern Stoicism runs Stoic Week. And then because this is just something that you do on your own and you download the resources online, we wanted to make it a bit more personal.
So we started to organize an annual conference where people could actually come together physically and share their experiences. And that event we call Stoicon. And that worked very well as an in-person event. But then, of course, the pandemic came along. And so since then, it's gone online. And in some ways, that's good, right, because you can reach an even bigger audience, a global audience, which is really exciting. But it does mean we've lost that personal sort of face-to-face contact.
So I think going forward, we want to try and find a way to have a mixture of in-person events, but also online events that everyone can access. So that's kind of where we're at with Modern Stoicism at the moment. That sounds really interesting, like the idea that you tested the Stoic ideas and so whether a large group of people, if they apply those ideas, is it going to help them or not? What sort of practical advice or what did you tell to the people who came to those gatherings? What sort of advice did they have to follow? How did it work? Is there anything that our listeners can, let's say, apply on their own? Yeah, of course.
So, I mean, there are the kind of key Stoic ideas, of course, about what's most important in life, how they think our emotions develop and so on and so forth. So there's that kind of the element of the theory. I won't go through all of that right now. But in terms of the kind of practical ideas, I suppose the key most important one is what psychotherapists would call cognitive distancing. So what that means is really trying to open up some space between experiencing something and then your reaction to it.
So rather than just responding very, very quickly and unthinkingly to a particular situation, which might mean that you get very angry if someone behaves in a certain way towards you, you want to be able to open up a certain space between the event and then the judgment that you make about it. And so if someone behaves very poorly towards you, rather than just reactively becoming angry in response, you just want to open up a little gap and say, well, wait a minute, why is this person behaving in that way? Is this really directed towards me? Are they just having a bad day? Is the appropriate response for me to respond with anger back at them? And by creating that little space, it enables people to think about the judgment they're making about the various situations and experiences they have in their life.
And that's really kind of the key, if you like, stoic technique that we're trying to encourage people to do throughout the day, right? With constant reminders so that it's possible for them to make calmer, more rational decisions rather than just responding reactively and emotionally, which is obviously one of the things the stoics are going to say we ought not to do. One of the stoic ideas that kind of helps me to distance between, like, and helps me to control my impulses, you know, not to react instantaneously is Seneca's quote where he says that we often suffer in our imagination instead of like in reality.
Every time when I get scared that something is going to happen in the future not the way I want, I always remind myself of that quote and it puts a distance between what my imagination projects as bad thing happening and kind of helps me to say, like, hold on, it might not happen at all. It might turn out the other way around. Is it sort of this kind of advice and practical tips that you were suggesting to the people who were coming to this thing as well? Yes.
Yeah, absolutely. So as you say, that's a really cool idea and Epictetus expresses the same idea where he says it's not things that upset us but our judgments about things, which is the same idea as Seneca was expressing. And that version put forward by Epictetus was a really important influence on the development of early cognitive psychotherapy. So it's had a huge impact in a realm where people might not think that these are particularly stoic ideas but in fact the essence of the idea really is that core stoic idea and obviously lots of people have benefited from that kind of cognitive psychotherapy.
And other things that we've done that we do as well in Stoic Week in particular. So one technique that we find in ancient philosophy that the Stoics adopted is called the premeditation of future evils, which is a slightly convoluted name. But there's a great passage in Marcus Aurelius where he outlines this. So this is the beginning of book two, chapter one in the meditations. And he says, you know, when I get up in the morning, I remind myself that I'm probably going to encounter all sorts of grumpy, difficult, angry people throughout the day.
And I need to prepare myself for this. Right. So that if I do encounter people like that during the day, then it's not a sudden shock and I'm not kind of overwhelmed by that negative experience because I'm kind of already psychologically prepared for it. Right. But then the second half of Marcus's thought is just as important. And he also reminds himself, he says, and also remember that none of these people choose to be like that on purpose.
Right. No one goes out in the world choosing to be difficult and disruptive and angry and upset. You know, all of those people are behaving in those unpleasant ways because of whatever issues and problems they've got in their own lives. And so rather than responding to those people with anger or frustration, instead, perhaps we ought to try and respond with a certain degree of sympathy. Right. You know, you meet the angry, difficult sort of commuter on the morning train who's barging past other people and being really difficult.
It's like, well, you know. Especially in London. Yeah, exactly. You know, what sort of things are going on in this person's life to make them be like that? You know, how little sleep did they get that night? You know, I'm sure they didn't wake up in the morning choosing to behave in that way. It reminds me of a story a couple of years ago. I was just passing St. Paul's Cathedral and decided to enter, take a couple of photographs.
So I entered the cathedral and opened my camera and started taking pictures. And there was this lady, a member of staff who worked at St. Paul's Cathedral. She started shouting several meters away, like, no photos, like really angrily. And she was really yelling. And I approached her. I was like, are you OK? You are like overreacting to this. Because she was really like angry for taking pictures. It was a clear overreaction. And when I asked her, are you OK? Like, you know, why are you so overreacting to this thing? She was so taken aback by shock because she thought I'm going to come back, yell back at her, say like, no, I want to take a picture.
But there was a second or two of shock, her realizing that she was overly angry. And it kind of de-escalated the situation to the degree that she apologized to me. You know, she said like, sorry that I reacted that way. It is just the policy, et cetera. I kind of like your story. It reminded me of that particular situation that I was in a couple of years ago. I wanted to ask you, who was your first Stoic philosopher you read? Like, what introduced you to the world of Stoicism? Do you remember? I think the first Stoic text I read was probably Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Thinking Back.
And I think not long after that, I read Epictetus. I'd been studying ancient philosophy as part of my degree, and we'd been reading Plato. And I quite liked the figure of Socrates. He seemed like a really sort of appealing character in many ways. But I didn't particularly like Plato. I wasn't particularly interested in Plato's wider kind of philosophical outlook. So I became curious about whether there were other people who thought of themselves as followers of Socrates who weren't Platonists.
And I remember coming across references to Epictetus and people saying that this guy was a Stoic. I didn't really have a clear sense of what a Stoic was at that point. But he definitely wasn't a Platonist. But he was also very, very Socratic in his outlook and his approach. And so I became interested in him as a different type of follower of Socrates, if you like. So, yeah, and then various other things that I've studied, often there seem to be references to Stoicism.
I was interested in the 17th century philosopher Spinoza, who has lots of interesting things to say about emotions. And there were various references to say that Spinoza was a bit like the Stoics. And so after a while, there were half a dozen different things I was all quite interested in. And they all seem to be connections to the Stoics in some way. So I thought, OK, these are obviously people that I need to go learn a bit more about because they seem to be the missing link between a kind of a disparate set of interests that I developed.
That sounds really interesting. Because like, personally to me, I discovered Stoicism through Seneca. His ideas are always like, even the titles of his essays when you go to the bookshop are so enticing and appealing, you know, on the shortness of life. And all those things like really attracted me. I struggled with Marcus Aurelius because sometimes he might get a little bit repetitive. So I prefer to read meditations like by taking breaks between the ideas. So it's not a book that you open and read from the beginning till the end.
If you could recommend someone who has read your book and wants to encounter Stoics first-hand, would you say that Marcus Aurelius would be the best place to start? Or would you advise a certain essay by Seneca? Or you would say Epictetus? What would you say to a person who would ask a question like that? Yeah, I mean, that's a very good question. I think part of it comes down to taste or temperament. So, I mean, I think most people that get interested in Stoicism do start with Marcus Aurelius.
I think in some ways he's the most accessible. But as you say, there is a certain amount of repetition there. And some people might find that irritating after a while. And also, Marcus doesn't really say anything about Stoicism, right? It's all implicit and in the background. And if you actually don't know, I mean, I've met people who have read Marcus Aurelius and think it's a really wonderful book. But they hadn't even realized that he was a Stoic.
I mean, if you buy a modern translation and you skip the introduction and just read the text, there's very little in there that tells you this is about Stoicism. Now, if you know a bit about Stoicism already and you read Marcus Aurelius, I think you get a lot more out of it because you can see all of the ideas that he's implicitly drawing on. So he's very accessible. But there's a sense in which you might be quite confused about what Stoicism is after reading just Marcus Aurelius.
I mean, I'm also, like you, a big fan of Seneca's essays. I think they're wonderful. And I mean, I read them after I read Epictetus and Marcus, but I think they are brilliant. And the philosophy in them is, if you like, a bit more explicit in some of those essays. So I think that they are a really good start. I had a very interesting experience at the moment, actually, over the last few weeks. I've been teaching a course on Roman Stoicism.
And a couple of my students, we looked at some Epictetus and then we looked at some Marcus Aurelius. And a couple of my students commented that when we were reading Epictetus, they really didn't like what they were reading. They had some real doubts about Stoicism. But when we moved on to Marcus Aurelius, suddenly they thought it looked fantastic and they really got into it. Epictetus was a bit too harsh for them. He's kind of the tough schoolmaster who's telling everyone how they're getting everything wrong all the time.
He's kind of, you know, he's a tough character. And so some people just might not warm to him as a writer, whereas Marcus Aurelius comes across as a bit more fallible. You know, I mean, on the one hand, he's Roman Emperor, which feels like really intimidating. But in practice, he's just this kind of fallible guy who's making mistakes, who's trying to work out how to navigate through life. And I think ironically, despite being Emperor of Rome, he's a very relatable figure for a lot of people.
I hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Dr. Sellers. And before we will continue, I would like to thank everyone who sent their questions for this episode and for Dr. Sellers. I was so excited to receive so many emails and read your thoughts about Dr. Sellers' book and to see what sort of questions you're curious about, what sort of questions you would like me to ask him during this interview. So thank you all for sending your questions.
And if you would like to send your questions, if you don't know, you can do this by subscribing to my newsletter, which is a monthly newsletter in which I share all my favorite books and their ideas. I summarize them, but I also let everyone know who is going to be the next guest on this podcast. So if you would like to send your questions to the future guests, consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter, which will be linked down in the description below.
You can also get in touch with me via Instagram, which also will be linked down in the description. Feel free to send me a private message. I reply to everyone. So everything will be linked down in the description. Once again, thank you all for sending your questions. And let's jump back to my interview with Dr. Sellers. Dr. Sellers. I never thought about it. Yeah, like, Marcus Aurelius, although he was a Roman emperor, he was, he's much softer.
And as you said, feels like more fallible, while like Epictetus, who was a former slave, feels more like harsher. You know, we would expect that this would be the other way around. I don't know. What about Seneca? Did they say anything about Seneca? Because he's very accessible just because he's talking to you as a friend. You know, all of his essays are very direct, friendly letters. You know, what would they say about Seneca? What do they think about him? I wanted to ask you, there are several schools of philosophy there.
There were Epicureanists. There were skeptics. There were stoics. What makes them different from each other in terms of ideas? What distinguishes stoicism from, let's say, Epicureanism? You wrote about Epicureanism as well. You have a separate book about that. Could you, like, explore this, those different philosophies? And why did they emerge? Why there was so much different outlook on how to live and achieve happiness? Yeah, so there's a sense in which they're all engaged in a common project, right? They're all trying to understand the world around them.
They're all trying to come up with some kind of recipe for how to live a good life. Epicurus is famously reported to have said, empty are the words of a philosopher that offer no cure for human suffering. So he thinks that philosophy is a therapeutic project that's going to help people. And the Stoics certainly seem to have thought that as well. So there's a sense in which there's a common ground on the common project, but they come up with very different answers.
So famously, the Stoics think that the key to living a good life is virtue, right? To develop a virtuous character. And that's the thing that matters most of all. The Epicureans are going to say that the key is pleasure. Enjoying pleasure, but also avoiding pain. So that looks like it's quite different. But actually, if you dig a bit deeper, we also see them come relatively close together. So the Epicureans will go on to say, well, it's pleasure that matters.
But in fact, it's not about just pursuing pleasure. What's more important in many ways is avoiding pain, right? What we really want is not to be suffering. And we're not just talking about physical pleasure and pain here. We're also talking about psychological pleasure and pain. And so for the Epicureans, the ultimate goal becomes avoiding psychological pain, right? And attaining a certain tranquil mental state. And there's a sense in which that's what the Stoics are after as well, right? To avoid destructive emotions that are going to upset our tranquil mental state.
To become resilient and cope with difficult situations and retain our tranquility, even when times are hard. So there's a sense in which they reach the same conclusion, but through very different routes. The way I understand Epicureanism, I might be wrong. Correct me if I'm wrong. Is that the pleasure for Epicureans is adjusting our needs to what nature demands. It's not like consumptive, kind of consumptional pleasure that we experience today. You know, like going and shopping and doing all this stuff excessively.
As far as I understand, seeking pleasure is like adjusting yourself to the harmony of the world. And therefore you can reach tranquility if you are in harmony with nature. Do I understand it correctly, like Epicureanists' idea of pleasure and avoiding pain? Yes, I mean, they certainly do think that we ought to reduce our physical needs to a minimum. Or certainly not, as you rightly say, not overindulge ourselves. So they draw a distinction between different desires that we have.
And some of them they call natural and necessary, which would be just the basic things like food and water and shelter. Those things that we just need in order to survive. And then they say there are some that are natural but unnecessary. So when we want particularly nice food and not just shelter, but a particularly nice house. So these things go beyond what's necessary to survive. But they still come from natural desires. And then there's all the other stuff that most of us waste our time pursuing, which is all the stuff that's unnatural and unnecessary, right? We don't need it.
And it just gets in the way of living a tranquil life. So the Epicurean thing, if we can kind of strip down, understand that our basic needs for survival are actually minimal. We don't need that much to get by. That in itself will reduce our psychological suffering, right? Because we'll realize you actually don't need that much money. And that, you know, you can survive on a perfectly modest diet. And once you realize that, then that in itself will remove a lot of the concern and worry we have about the future.
Right. Which often is about, you know, am I going to be OK? Am I going to have enough money next week, next month? So. Yeah, so they think that we strip that down to the basics. So, again, a point of contact, if you like, between the Stoics and the Epicureans, in the sense that both of them will be advocating a fairly modest lifestyle where we don't invest too much value in external possessions and those sorts of things.
It is really interesting how, like, the first chapter of your book, on lessons in Stoicism, says that the philosopher as a doctor, you know, that all those philosophies were not abstract. No, not like they had to have a practical application to our well-being. And very often I ask myself a question, when was that moment when the philosophy became more theoretical, kind of more detached from having a particular application to our lives? What would your answer be? There is such an appeal in the 21st century for Stoics, for Epicureans, for ideas of Aristotle that are practical.
People crave for philosophy, but I think many people that I talked with, they have a problem with certain philosophy books, not only because they might be difficult to read, but also because they don't see the point of how they can improve their lives. You know, what's the point of reading? When was that moment when philosophy stopped being practical and became more theoretical? What's your opinion on that? Well, I mean, I would flip things around a bit.
So I think that philosophy actually begins being very theoretical. And in the very early period of Greek philosophy, obviously there's no real distinction between philosophy and science, right? So the earliest Greek philosophers are just trying to understand the natural world, and they're engaged in things like astronomy and that kind of thing. They're not necessarily thinking about philosophy being something that could be practical or useful. And one of the earliest Greek philosophers, called Parmenides, writes this incredibly dense abstract poem about the nature of being, right? What does it mean for something to exist? So it's very, very theoretical.
And in the kind of standard narrative, it's Socrates, we're told, who was the first philosopher to bring philosophy down from the heavens and make it something practical about how to live. So Socrates is the guy that makes philosophy something relevant to those sorts of practical questions about how to live. And then these Hellenistic schools like Stoicism and Epicureanism come along in his wake and really continue that spirit of philosophy as something very practical. And then again, the kind of traditional narrative is that the Romans were sort of temperamentally a very practically minded bunch, right? So that kind of practical philosophy was something that really appealed to them.
And so that's why it flourishes in the Roman Empire. Now as to why it then sort of disappears, I mean, one of the kind of explanations that's often given is connected to the rise of Christianity. And as Christianity takes hold in late antiquity, it, of course, has its own set of answers about how you ought to live, right? And, you know, has practical exercises and the set of values and all those other things. So suddenly, philosophy kind of loses its role as the guide for how you ought to live because Christianity, once it becomes ubiquitous in Europe, is giving us those answers instead.
I recently discovered a thinker whose name is Boethius, who wrote The Constellations of Philosophy. And it's interesting that he's essentially lived in the Christian times. He was a Christian thinker, but everything that he discusses in his book or refers to all the thinkers are mostly ancient Roman thinkers, including Stoics and others. And, like, one of the reviews of that book also said, interestingly, that Boethius, despite of being a Christian and lived in Christian times, found practical help in the ancient thinkers, you know.
So it's interesting. And you mentioned Spinoza, that Spinoza has a lot of things taken from Stoicism. I've interviewed Professor Stephen Nadler, who wrote a book on Spinoza, and he tells there that Spinoza was incredibly influenced by Stoic philosophers. Because Spinoza also has a lot of practical advice. It's a bit harder to read him in contrast to Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, but there are those elements of practicality in the things that he discusses in his book. If you could, like, select one book by those Stoic philosophers, like, let's say that all the other books disappear, which book you would preserve, which text would be the core, in your opinion? Oh, gosh, that's a really difficult question.
Okay, so I'm going to offer a slightly different answer. So I think if you really wanted to preserve one book that would give you the kind of essence of Stoic ethics, so that you could really understand it, it wouldn't be by one of those Roman Stoics at all. It would actually be a book by Cicero, which is his book called De Finibus, or On Ends. In terms of one book that gives us a succinct account of Stoic ethics, and it really explains the details and how it works, that's probably the most valuable book that we have.
So that would be the one I wouldn't want to lose. What does he say there? Is it a description of Stoics, a summary of his ideas, or why is it such an important book? It's important because it explains the kind of key elements of Stoic ethical theory. It explains the relationship between virtue and what they call indifference. It explains the role of our kind of instinct of self-preservation and how that changes as we develop and become rational agents.
It just really goes into the details, right? I mean, people like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius are giving us examples of how you might put some of these ideas into practice, but they don't actually set out all of those details, right? Because they know them already. So, yeah, I think Cicero's book would be a very good one to hold on to. So that book's called On Ends. There's another book by Cicero as well called On Duties, which is a slightly more practical guide to living a Stoic life, and it's a book that Cicero wrote for his son.
And that also is very rich and very interesting. So I suppose that would be my advice to the budding Stoic. Don't just think it's all about Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. These two books in particular by Cicero are also really valuable and really help give people a sense of how all of the ideas fit together. I think I have On Duties by Cicero. I haven't read it, but I haven't seen On Ends. Is there a modern edition of Cicero's On Ends right now, or is it...? Yeah, I mean, there's a relatively recent translation published by Cambridge University Press, and it has the title On Moral Ends.
That would be the one that I would recommend. That's great, thank you. Cicero actually, like, would you say that Cicero was a Stoic? Because Cicero in my mind is this orator, a person who can teach us rhetoric, of course a philosopher, but was he a Stoic himself, or can we define him as a Stoic? So, I mean, this brings us back to something that you mentioned earlier when we were talking about the different schools of Hellenistic philosophy, and you mentioned the skeptics briefly.
So, strictly speaking, Cicero was a skeptic. At the time, Plato's Academy was full mainly of skeptically-minded philosophers, and Cicero was a follower of that. So, he's not officially a Stoic at all. But as a skeptic, he's prepared to accept ideas that he finds plausible or likely from whatever source he might find them in. And when it comes to ethics, Cicero thinks that Stoic ethics is the most plausible ethical theory out there. So, he doesn't have much time for the Epicureans.
And, of course, the skeptics themselves don't have any ethical theories, right? Because they don't really believe anything. But of the ethical theories that are available, he thinks the Stoics are close to the mark. So, he's not a Stoic himself, but he's a sympathetic commentator, we might say. And skepticism back in time meant suspension of judgment of all things, I'm going to mispronounce this perhaps Greek word, epoké, like the suspension of judgment. Before doing that, what skepticism is about.
That's my limited knowledge about it. Yes, that's right. And again, I mean, for the Stoics, there's the thought that a good deal of our psychological suffering is the product of mistaken beliefs that we have. And so, if we can overcome those, we can avoid some of that suffering. And again, the Epicureans will say something similar, that our fear of death, for instance, can create a lot of suffering for us. So, we need to get rid of that mistaken belief.
And the skeptics are on the same page, right? They think that it's our beliefs that we hold, often which are mistaken, can cause all sorts of suffering. And so, they come to the conclusion that if you just don't believe anything firmly, then you're much less likely to suffer any great psychological distress because you just kind of shrug your shoulders and say, yeah, whatever, that's cool. I'm not invested in this debate. I'm not going to get upset about it.
So again, there's some interesting common ground there between these different Hellenistic schools. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Dr. Sellers. And if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, please consider leaving a review. As you may know, leaving a review on my podcast can make a huge impact on its success. Every review helps more people discover and enjoy my podcast. And I would greatly appreciate your help in spreading the word. If you found this conversation interesting and thought-provoking, please take a moment to leave a review on your preferred podcast platform.
Your feedback and support mean the world to me. Thank you for being a part of my community and helping me to reach more listeners. And let's get back to the episode. Cicero's Life After Death Essentially, everything revolves around the idea that you should acknowledge what you don't know from what you know. You don't know what's going to happen in the future. You don't know what this life after death is like. So don't worry about things that you don't know.
Just embrace your ignorance and limits of your knowledge in some sense. I think that's what Cicero says in his book on living and dying well, if I'm not mistaken, in the Oxford recent edition. I really like his perspective that people just simply don't know. It could be great after death or it could be not great after death. There's nothing you can do. So stoics as well have this perspective, essentially. Don't focus on the things that you don't know about.
Don't worry about those elements. I wanted to ask you one of the questions. You wrote about Epicureanism, you wrote about stoicism, and your recent book that was released on the 2nd of February, if I'm not mistaken, is about Aristotle. Why did you decide to dedicate this book to Aristotle after exploring Epicureans and stoics? Aristotle is someone who has been floating in the background for me for a very long time. When I first started out studying, he always struck me as a very intimidating figure and his texts can be very difficult to read.
He wrote a lot on a wide range of subjects, so it's difficult to know where to start and how to piece it all together. There are various books on Aristotle out there. Most of which are written by very eminent Aristotle scholars, but there's a sense in which they're so embedded in the material that they don't quite have the perspective to really present his ideas in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. I think it's a real challenge.
After a certain point, I just felt that maybe it would be possible to try to present Aristotle in a way that could really open him up to a wider audience. As I've taught various bits and pieces of his philosophy over the years and felt more comfortable with his works as a whole, I kind of got the sense that he's had a bad press over the years. I mean, he's often presented as this kind of big authority figure or sometimes people would say, well, he's just outdated and he's wrong on various things, so we don't need to worry about him anymore, but philosophy and science have just moved on.
I thought that these were slightly unfair judgments against Aristotle. He strikes me as an incredibly open-minded thinker who's just curious about everything, right? He's interested in the natural world, he's interested in philosophy, he's interested in literature, in politics, and he just wants to understand it all. And there's a really positive, open spirit of inquiry in all of his works, I think. He's not this kind of big dogmatic authority figure. And so what I really wanted to get across is the idea that you can really admire Aristotle as this great thinker, even if you don't agree with him on particular things that he says.
You can be an Aristotelian in the sense of believing everything he wrote and adopting the ideas. But you can also be an Aristotelian in a different sense, which is just kind of embracing that kind of open spirit of curiosity and inquiry. And so that was really what I wanted to try and get across in the book and present Aristotle as this just great explorer of the world that we live in. And in that sense, I think you can be an Aristotelian in that sense that I've been describing, as well as a Stoic or anything else.
And so that's really what I wanted to try to convey. So it would be a great introduction for someone who doesn't know Aristotle and his works. Would your book be a great introduction for a person like that who is encountering Aristotle either for the first time or not knowing a lot about him? Would you say that it would be a great place to start? I hope so. That's the intention. If we could travel back in time, I would have a time machine and I would take your book on Aristotle and give it to him and he could read it in English.
And what do you think he would say about your book? What would be his opinion? Oh gosh, that's a... It's a good summary of my ideas. It's a good representation. What do you think he would say? Well, I mean, obviously, I hope so. I hope it captures the spirit of his approach. It's not an attempt to outline all of the different ideas he had because there are just so many. But I hope it captures his kind of spirit of inquiring and curiosity.
So I hope he would think that it gets that right at least. Is there a question you would have liked to ask him? If I could transform myself and, like, Aristotle would be on this chair on this side of the camera. Is there a question that you would like to ask him? I mean, I suppose one interesting question in trying to really pin down what Aristotle is doing in his philosophy is his relationship with Plato, who was, of course, his great teacher, and the extent to which Aristotle completely tries to escape from Plato's philosophy, or the extent to which Plato's philosophy is still lingering in the background of his own thought.
And people still argue about this today. So I suppose one interesting question would be what was his attitude towards Plato's philosophy and how much of it was still informing what he was doing and how much of it he thought had to be rejected. That would be, I think, an interesting question to get his views on. Can I ask a similar question, like, regarding the Stoics? First of all, if you could select one of those great Stoics, maybe let's include Cicero as well, although he hasn't identified himself as a Stoic.
First of all, which figure would you choose to have a conversation with? Would it be Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, or Cicero? If you could have a day-long or a week-long conversation with them, like walking in the hills of Rome, asking them questions, which of those thinkers, of those figures would it be? Yeah, that is a great question. I think I would say Seneca, actually. I think that from their texts, we get a reasonably clear idea of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and what they thought.
I think Seneca is much harder to pin down in many ways. Again, in part, this might be to do with his subsequent reputation. He had this role in the center of Roman politics. He's this advisor to Nero. It's never quite clear to what extent that he found himself in that position, almost sort of against his will. Circumstances forced him into this role. Another view seems that he was quite happy in that role. He was quite ambitious and, in some ways, complicit with many terrible things that happened at that time.
So I think to be able to talk to him and get a sense of his role in the politics of the time versus his interest in philosophy and who he really was, right? Was he this ambitious politician who just made lip service to philosophy? Or was he this devoted philosopher who just found himself in this incredibly difficult situation that he couldn't really extricate himself from? I think those would be the interesting conversations to have with him.
I always found him really interesting just because he's so much talking about his career, not in terms of career, but he tells us about focusing on important things in life. But at the same time, you never know why he was at the court of Nero, why he was surrounded by those terrible events that happened. I think that the most pleasant out of those four would be Cicero to have a conversation with. I think he would be a good friend.
I don't know if you have the same opinion. And I think it would be really difficult to speak with Marcus Aurelius because I think he was very reticent in the sense that he had too much control over him and Epictetus could have been very kind of brushed, like angry, like, I don't know, as he said, a bad teacher, kind of angry teacher. Do you think it is that I depict those people correctly or I'm mistaken? No, I think that's broadly right.
I mean, with Cicero, I would say, we get quite a clear sense of his personality, particularly from his letters. So, you know, he was a fairly ambitious figure and his career and his role in Roman politics was obviously very important to him. So there's a sense in which I agree with you, he could be a fantastic person to have a conversation with, but we might not learn that much. I think Seneca is the one where it's really hard to pin him down and so that's where we could really, you know, really learn something quite new.
So that's why I'd still stick with him. I wanted to ask you, like, there were a lot of, like, book recommendations that we explored in our conversation, but could you recommend to our listeners three great books on pretty much anything? Like, it doesn't necessarily have to be Stoicism or even Philosophy, but something that you really enjoy, that book that has a special place on your shelf in your library. Are there three of those kind of books there? Earlier I mentioned a book by Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life.
I mean, I would certainly recommend that. He's a wonderful writer and he really brings some of these ancient ideas to life. And he's not talking about any particular ancient philosophical school. And in some places, not really just talking about ancient philosophy, although that's his focus, he also brings in, you know, some later writers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and some of the existentialists. But it's a real kind of love letter to philosophy and the way in which it can be transformative and practical and relevant.
I mean, I think that would be my first recommendation. And beyond that, I mean, it's just so difficult to choose. Is there a book that you would rescue from your home, like, first thing if you had to run away or something? Like, if there was one book that you had to, like, pick up from the shelf after the Hadot's book, what would be the second book that you would run away with? That's the thing, yeah. I mean, you know, I've got hundreds, thousands of books.
I would die in the fire trying to rescue them all, my friend. I totally can relate with that. So, should we say something like maybe a single work by Seneca, maybe a single essay by Seneca that you would say? And, like, I think that would be, like, kind of a good direction for our listeners. So, I mean, I would probably say Epic Titus' Discourses. So, I said earlier that he can feel like a slightly harsh and an unforgiving writer sometimes, but he's a writer that I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking with, and I have a very battered, old, annotated copy that I've spent a lot of time with.
So, I think that would be the book that I would grab as I was trying to escape the fire. So, yes, Haddo and Epic Titus. And we talked about Cicero earlier. I mean, Cicero's On Duty, I think, is actually a really nice and in some ways underrated book. And I've been rereading parts of that recently and really enjoying it. So, I think that can be my third. That's great. Thank you so much. Is there any question that you wanted me to ask, but I didn't ask you? Is there anything that you would like to share with our listeners before we'll stop our recording? No, I can't think of anything.
I think we've covered a lot of ground, haven't we? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think we explored several schools of philosophy, their key ideas. This is going to be incredibly interesting to everyone. I would like once again to thank you, Dr. Sellers, for coming to my podcast. It is going to be so interesting for my listeners. I've got so many emails asking about you, your work, and I'm very excited to share this with everyone. Thank you once again, and I would recommend everybody to read Lessons in Stoicism, but also your recent book on Aristotle.
And I'm personally going to grab also your book on The Art of Living. I didn't know about it. I knew about Aristotle and about Stoicism, but not that much. Thank you very much for having me along. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode with Dr. Sellers. We've covered so many different schools of philosophy, from Epicureanism and Stoicism to the ideas of Cicero and Aristotle. I hope those ideas will have a positive impact on your daily life as they did on mine.
And of course, you can find all the books that Dr. Sellers wrote and recommended on my website, which will be linked in the description of this episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review. It will take less than 30 seconds for you, but it will help more people to discover my podcast. Thank you once again for listening to my podcast, and I will see you in the next episode.
