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- What I've Been Reading | April 2023
What I've Been Reading | April 2023
Seneca, Ancient Chinese Philosophy, and Aphorisms
Caleb Ontiveros
April 30, 2023
Hi – my name’s Caleb. I’m one of the founder’s of Stoa and have a background in academic philosophy and startups. Welcome to my newsletter! If you’re not subscribed, subscribe here.
And here’s a list of what I’ve been reading in April 2023.
📖 The Madness of Hercules by Seneca
Dana Gioia translates Seneca's play into elegant prose. I wouldn’t recommend immediately jumping into it, unless you have a keen interest in Seneca’s plays – which perhaps you should. If you’d like to learn more about the life of the philosopher, playwright, and statesman James Romm’s Dying Every Day is an excellent biography. If you’ve never read any Seneca, check out his Moral Letters (links below).
📖 Lysis by Plato
A Socratic dialogue about the meaning of friendship. A remark from the Loeb Introduction captures the mood best:
Indeed one might say that, in one aspect of the dialogue, the mere tone of Socrates towards the boys is itself a lesson in friendship.
📖 The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh
A fine introduction to ancient Chinese philosophy from a self-help lens. In innocent prose, it contains deep challenges to common western ideas of individualism, power, and reason.
What we in the West define as the true self is actually patterns of continuous responses to people and the world; patterns that have built up over time. For example, you might think, I’m just the kind of person who gets annoyed easily. On the contrary, it’s more likely that you have become the kind of person who does get irritated over minor things because of how you’ve interacted with people for years. But that’s not because you are, in fact, such a person. By being loyal to a “true self,” you ended up concretizing destructive emotional habits.
📖 The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Taleb
I truly believe that Taleb is one of the philosophers of this age. In this book, his high-variance aphorisms touch on randomness, noise, and intensity of the age. Plenty of them are not good. But many are incisive observations, pithy putdowns, and properly challenging. Here are a few:
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with narrative.
For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.
📖 Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
The Penguin translation of Seneca’s Moral Letters. It’s a classic work, written to advise a fellow Roman.
I wrote about ideas from his second letter here.
You can also find a fine and free translation of Seneca's moral letters on Wikipedia.
🐦️ From Twitter
Besides the original texts of Marcus, Seneca, and Epictetus, this really is the book I come back to most often when studying Stoicism.
Ancient sources broken down by theme (Virtue, Soul, Passions), with commentary.
10/10 would recommend for anyone trying to go deeper.
— Michael Tremblay (@_MikeTremblay)
Apr 26, 2023
On this day 2,776 years ago, the city of Rome was founded.
Here are seven authors you should read if you want to educate yourself about the city of seven hills.
— Sachin (@sachinmaini)
Apr 21, 2023
We didn't get to invent classical architecture or impressionism, but rocket launches might be our aesthetic contribution for the age.
(amazing photo from @erikkuna)
— Caleb Watney (@calebwatney)
Apr 20, 2023
I know very few people who, when they say they want to do something, end up doing it.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb)
Apr 18, 2023
I am always utterly amazed that these lines of poetry were written by an insurance company executive in Hartford, Connecticut
— Nabeel Qureshi (@nabeelqu)
Apr 7, 2023
Let me know if you pick any of these up or share what you’ve read this month.
If you’d like to read more of my writing check out my weekly newsletter on Stoicism:
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