Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEPtics.org.

Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Massimo Pilucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Massimo, this episode comes hot on the heels of International Stoic Week 2014, which is a week in which participants

are encouraged to try living by the precepts of the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism.

And so more broadly, this episode is going to be about not just the results of that experiment, which Massimo participated in, but also what stoicism is, how it can be useful in modern life and maybe some potential problems or, I don't know, nuances to it.

Absolutely.

So, well, before I ask you, Massimo, about the results of your experiment in participating in stoicism last month, maybe we should just sort of check and make sure we are on the same page about what stoicism is, because I found this a little bit difficult to pin down, actually.

Okay. Sounds good.

My cursory, like, I've read some Stoic philosophers.

So my attempt at defining what it is would be a philosophy of living.

I'll focus just on the sort of how to live parts, not on the metaphysics or the logic, per se.

A philosophy of living that encourages you to shed or diminish negative emotions,

specifically by recognizing what is and isn't under your control

and not feeling negatively about the things that you can't control.

And also sort of seeing the

world deterministically, like understanding the mechanisms that cause things to happen.

So that you don't, like to help diminish the sense of outrage or injustice that you feel when,

for example, someone does something, you know, that seems evil, which is not to say that, like, you shouldn't try to change that if you think that that's

possible or feasible, but that you feel less of that sense of sort of helpless outrage because

...