Hello and we're going to the symposium. Today I'm very pleased to be joined by Bo.

And we're going to talk about Stoicism and more specifically about Seneca.

Seneca is a very interesting stoic and he's one of the three main stoics that we have a substantial amount of work

to judge them from the other two are Epictetus that we have dealt with in

Symposium 20 I think and we were when we talked about his Stoic manual and also Marcus Aurelius and his meditations which if this

goes well perhaps we could visit in relatively short time. So I think Seneca's a very interesting figure because a long time ago when I first read him I wasn't particularly impressed, but now that I focused a bit more and read him a bit more deeply,

I was a bit impressed. And I want to say that he is very modern in a sense.

And what do you mean by that?

He is very much interested in things people are nowadays interested in,

such as self-development, self-growth,

and how to think about life. such as self-development, self-growth,

and how to think about life.

And in that respect, I think he has a lot to say to us.

I'm quite a big fan of Seneca who I like Socrates and I like Seneca.

They're probably my two favorite ancient philosophers. A lot of people like them.

Yeah and Seneca a lot of his stuff are his letters that he wrote while he was exiled on Corsica.

That's a lot of the stuff that survives of Salica, isn't it?

And yeah, like all Stoics, like all Stoicism,

it is sort of a philosophy, it's sort of a practical philosophy.

It's actually supposed to, and does, hopefully, does hopefully help you in your real life.

It's not all that abstract quite often.

Yes and so it can actually help. What is really distinctive about his writings is that he was much more of an essayist

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