Fantham's Selection of Seneca's Letters

If you're looking for a less pricey English edition of Seneca's letters than the complete edition of the letters from Chicago University Press, this is the one to get. It contains the largest selection of the letters currently available in any English selection in an extremely readable and accurate translation and with a highly informative introduction. Each letter is prefaced with a precise and thorough summary and the original section numbers are preserved. The paperback version is a perfect gift to someone who doesn't now much about Stoicism yet and is willing to give it a closer look. For these reasons I highly recommend the paperback version of this book.

A word of warning, though. The ebook version of the book is pretty badly produced. First of all, the text is very poorly formatted if you use the standard "flowing text" mode of the Google Play Books app. Furthermore, since each letter is not its own chapter, it's very hard to find a specific letter and also hard to know which letter a given search result is in, if you use the brilliant search feature of the Google Play Books app. The complete edition of the letters from Chicago University Press is vastly superior as an ebook (but remember to check the prize carefully at both Amazon and Google Play. It's usually a lot cheaper at Google Play).

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=GzrYJka6fTsC

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Stoicism and Evil Governments

This article claims that a Stoic has no reason to get depressed by bad political conditions since an evil government is not really a bad thing for a Stoic - since nothing can be bad for a Stoic except his own bad choices. Even so, the article claims, a Stoic acknowledges that an evil government is capable of doing "terrible things" to people. To make this line of thinking work we have to think of ourselves as Stoics who can't be harmed by an evil government - since nothing can be bad for us as Stoics except our own bad choices - and other people as non-Stoics who will suffer terribly if they are oppressed by the evil government. In my opinion, this interpretation of Stoicism is flat out wrong. First of all, an evil government is indeed a bad thing. The Stoics distinguish between internal good/bad things such as our own good or bad choices and external good/bad things such as other people's happiness or unhappiness: "some bad things are in the sou

Aristotle on happiness and external goods

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A few quick notes on committing injustice vs suffering it

Let's suppose that person A is entitled to, say, one piece of cake. If person B knowingly causes person A to not have that piece of cake without the consent of person A, then person B has done person A wrong - which is what the Stoics mean by committing an injury. But it doesn't follow from this that person A has suffered an injury. If person A doesn't mind that his or her piece of cake was given to someone else or was eaten by person B, then person A hasn't suffered an injury - even though person B have commited an injury. Now, let's imagine that person A is completely wise. This would mean that he or she is completely indifferent to things like bodily harm, poverty, sickness, reputation, insults, abuse and whatever else life or other human beings can throw at us. Obviously, it would still be possible to commit an injury in relation to a person like that - since this would simply require having the intention to harm that person. However, it would be impossible to

Socrates and the Stoics

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