Stoicism
Discourses and Selected Writings
by Epictetus(~108 CE)
A collection of Epictetus's teachings as recorded by his student Arrian, covering core Stoic principles on freedom, resilience, and living in accordance with nature.
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Episodes featuring this book
Stoic Philosophy for Sleep
Marcus Aurelius governed the Roman Empire and wrote private notes reminding himself that none of it mattered. Seneca amassed enormous wealth and wrote letters on the poverty of the soul. Epictetus was born a slave and taught that no one had ever been enslaved who understood what was truly their own. This episode traces Stoic philosophy from its origins with Zeno in the Painted Stoa through its three great Roman practitioners. It examines the dichotomy of control, the four cardinal virtues, the Stoic understanding of emotion and desire, the discipline of assent, the practice of premeditatio malorum, the cosmopolitan vision of a world citizenry, and passages from the Meditations, the Letters to Lucilius, and the Enchiridion that have helped people endure difficulty for two thousand years.
Nothing Lasts, and That Is the Point
Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman world and spent his nights writing to himself about how little any of it mattered. This three-hour episode explores Stoic physics, the dichotomy of control, virtue ethics, death, impermanence, and the discipline of perception, from Marcus's education under the finest teachers in Rome to the grinding years of frontier warfare and the devastation of the Antonine Plague. The Meditations, composed in Greek during military campaigns on the Danube frontier, was never intended for publication. It is a philosophical journal, a record of one man's attempt to hold himself to the demands of Stoic virtue while governing an empire in crisis. We present Marcus Aurelius's philosophy as a serious system, not a collection of motivational quotes: its physics, which held the universe to be a single living rational organism; its epistemology, which located moral failure in judgments rather than events; and its ethics, which declared virtue the only genuine good and everything else indifferent.