Stoic hangs out a shingle
See Massimo Pigliucci's other Tweets
I ride the bus back and forth to my law office job everyday. And you see interesting things on the bus, even in Nashville. The other day I met a girl who lives in a halfway house and she told me that, if not for Plato, she would have killed herself. I though that was interesting. I thought about the person who knew Plato well enough, and cared about this halfway house girl enough, to give her what he could not have known at the time was a lifeline. I don't know if it will work for her, and I know even less about Plato.
But I just kept thinking, what a noble and selfless thing to give someone. You do that.
"A controversial new talk therapy, philosophical counseling takes the premise that many of our problems stem from uncertainties about the meaning of life and from faulty logic." Sounds very Epicurean. I like it!
ReplyDeleteEpicurean and Stoic, indeed. Lou Marinoff, though, despite his nod to Plato, seems to root his own version of therapy in eastern sources like the I Ching. Whatever works, say we pragmatists, but I'm a little leery of The Book of Changes. Stoic/Epicurean Pragmatism works pretty well for me.
DeleteHmm. I Ching, you say? Had to look that one up. What's the matter with The Book of Changes?
Delete