Abstract

The two introductory chapters are short, well written, and engaging. Chapter 1 constitutes an eloquent introduction to the state of Stoic philosophy. Naturalism and eudaimonism are central to Becker's new Stoic ethics, and his repeated use of the adjective “our” to describe Stoic remedies suggests that he preserves the ancient role of Stoic philosophy as a therapeutic ethics of diminished expectations. He might resist this characterization however, since he goes on to reject explicitly this vein within ancient Stoicism. Chapter 2 seeks to correct the unfortunate fact that philosophers generally reject Stoic therapy along with “tranquilizers and prefrontal lobotomies as means to a good life”. Becker identifies five important features of his new Stoic ethics: eudaimonism, intellectualism, naturalism, the formal unity of the virtues, and particularity, that is, role or self-mastery. He distances his new Stoicism from that of his ancient forerunners by reconsidering the problem of cosmic teleology. Given the continuity of Stoic thought through modernity, “it is reasonable to suppose that stoics would have found a way to reject teleological physics and biology when scientific consensus did; that they would have found ways to hold their own against the attacks on naturalism launched in the modern era. And it is reasonable to suppose that the sheer variety of self-identified stoics over the centuries would have prevented, as it did in antiquity, the view that a stoic life is typically a bleak one'. The author disclaims the extremes of architectonic theoretical system and therapeutic encheiridion as characterizations of his book· It is, rather, an “investigation of neglected possibilities” which tries to show the viability of stoicism as an ethical system.