About
These notes are intended to be an evolving, densely-linked, atomic collection of pointers on Stoicism gathered in no particular order. They are the result of reading about Stoic philosophy daily—to help develop which habit this project was envisioned in the first place.
Although unstructured by design, common and recurring Stoic ideas and themes are nevertheless collected under relevant tags for easing the experience for long-term and returning readers.
The title for these notes is inspired by Seneca’s famous collection Letters from a Stoic. This website is powered by Blot and comprises a bunch of wikilink-ridden markdown files written using iA Writer.
How to use these notes
Ideally, start anywhere—visit the Browse section, search, pick a recent note etc.—and follow links inside each note that will lead you to other notes. This should keep you occupied for quite some time depending on how long this project has been running.1
Alternately, follow backlinks listed at the bottom of every note that points you to other notes linking to the current one.
Of course if you have a specific topic in mind and wonder what the Stoics had to say about it, search for it or pick a relevant concept if one exists.
Fun fact The first-ever note in this collection was on preferred indifferents because the concept is one of my favourites in Stoicism.
Some tips for searching
Search by concept
Notes are always marked by the concepts they touch upon. I use the definition of ‘concepts’ in the manner of Lynn Erickson2 as “a mental construct that is timeless, universal and abstract”. Consider, for example, the concept of anger: anger is timeless in that it was present all through history; anger is universal in that everyone everywhere the world over can get, and probably has gotten, angry; and anger is abstract in that it is defined, rather than as a physical or mental object, solely based on a set of common features recognisable in space and time and within other physical entities (such as humans).
Concepts are labelled by their most commonly employed form, whether singular or plural. This may lead to confusion in some rare cases but is the simplest solution. So you have notes on ‘wants’ and not ‘want’, ‘anger’ and ‘nature’ with no plurals anyway, and ‘preferred indifferents’ and not its singular form.
Look up definitions
Admittedly, concept-based search can make it hard to look up the (usually) first note that contains the definition of a concept or anything else. For this reason, notes with definitions are also filed under the marker of ‘Definitions’. This is clearly an exception to the rule of only using concepts but is a worthwhile deviation.
Rather than searching ‘Definition of Nature’ prefer to simply look up all notes carrying definitions and then scroll down to the term you need. In nearly all cases there will be just one occurrence of it.
Looking through search results
Once you filter by concept, you will find a list of notes that discuss that concept to varying degrees. Notes are written in no specific order so they are also displayed in no specific order. Scroll through the list to find a note that seems interesting to you; go through this note and follow its links to other notes to actively explore the concept while remaining open to branching out to other concepts on the way, using the list of concepts mentioned at the bottom of every note.
Follow along
If you like these notes, bookmark this website—you can hit ⌘ + D to do this quickly—or just subscribe to the free RSS feed. You can also feel free to get in touch with me anytime and let me know if you’d be interested in hopping onto a plaintext mailing list to receive updates at longer intervals such as weekly or fortnightly.
Common references
Given the nature of preservation of Stoic texts we end up relying overly on a select few from the latter years of the active Stoic period. These are listed here in lieu of being cited repeatedly inside individual notes.
- Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. Trans. Campbell, Robin. United Kingdom, Penguin Books Limited, 2004.
- Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Trans. Clay, Diskin. United Kingdom, Penguin Books Limited, 2006.
- Epictetus. Discourses and selected writings. Trans. Dobbin, Robert. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 2008.
NB Excerpts may not match with these specific translations. Excerpts are chosen based on which translation best reflects the content.