Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the 21st century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you.

I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be an extensive Q&A and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your

philosophical hot takes. The tour dates are on screen. The link to buy tickets is in the description,

and I hope to see you there. John Sellers, welcome to the show. Thank you for inviting me.

Was Socrates the real founder of Stoicism?

That's a really good question.

I think in many ways he was, or perhaps it would be better to say, he was the kind of grandfather figure for Stoic ethics in particular.

And obviously there are other bits of Stoicism that I'm sure we'll talk about a little later as well.

So physics and logic.

But for ethics, I think, yes, that's a good way of putting it.

So he's the first Greek philosopher to put on the table the idea that it's a virtuous character and only a virtuous character

that's key to living a good life. And that's the kind of famous Socratic idea that the Stoics then

take up. But typically if you ask somebody who was the founder of Stoicism, they'll tell you it's

this chap, Zeno, right? Yeah, that's right. Zeno of Sitium, who's not the same Zeno famed for paradoxes? That's correct. So there's Zeno of Elia, who's the paradox guy, who was a pupil of Permanides. They were in southern Italy, so that's much earlier. Zeno of Scythium, so Scythium's in Cyprus, he comes from Cyprus, he comes to Athens. There's a great story that we have, which may or may not be true, which is that he was sent to Athens on a business trip by his father and with a ship full of cargo. And as he approached the harbour near Athens, there was a shipwreck, and he lost everything, and he kind of managed to survive

the shipwreck, drag himself up onto the beach, or by the Piraeus port, made his way, you know,

as he sorted himself out after the shipwreck, he kind of found a book store and started reading

in the bookstall. And one of the books he picked up was Xenophon's memorabilia of Socrates.

So literally the story we have is that his first encounter with philosophy was reading about

Socrates. And he then, again, this is all probably apocryphal, but he says to the bookseller,

wow, this Socrates guy sounds amazing. Where can I find people like him? And at that moment, another philosopher walks past a guy called Cretes, who was a cynic. And the bookseller says to him, follow that man. He'll teach you what you want to know. So that's the kind of origin story. Yeah. And Zeno is the guy who then gets credited with founding what comes to be known as Stoicism. And we'll get into

what Stoicism actually is. But it's interesting you say there that he begins by following a cynic.

The cynics are another sort of school, if you like, of philosophers from the same time period.

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