After more than a decade of studying and practising Stoicism, and nearly six years of teaching it, I don’t think the average person knows much more about it today than when I started. So in this episode I answer the question in the title as plainly as I can, after a few minutes of deliberately grumpy preamble meant to send away anyone who isn’t here to learn.

Stoicism is a virtue ethics framework, which means it cares about your character and the quality of your reasoning more than rules (Deontology) or outcomes (Consequentialism). I use the example of a charity donation to show how a Utilitarian, a Kantian, and a Stoic would each explain why the act is good, and why the Stoic says it stays good even if the charity goes bankrupt the next day.

From there I get into the claim underneath the whole thing: something is good when it does well what it was designed or evolved to do. A good knife cuts well, a good eye sees well, and a good human being reasons well. I explain how philosophers arrive at reason as our defining trait, why that argument is logically valid without being provably correct, and why accepting it is “rational confidence” and nothing like religious faith (gravity gets a look in here). If you won’t take that premise on board, you can still borrow Stoic tools the way Cognitive Behavioural Therapy does, but you can’t practise Stoicism.

I then look at whether anything has disproven Stoicism. Modern science has overturned three of the ancient claims that supported it (a purposeful and divine cosmos, literal biological design, and purely cognitive emotions), and yet the ethical core has held up, with support from Lawrence Becker’s work, from the CBT of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, and from centuries of surviving rival philosophies.

Finally, I explain why I think Modern Stoicism went too far in cutting out the physics and the logic, why I think Orthodox Stoicism needs a vocabulary update and not much else (Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on predictive processing comes up on the emotions question), and why what I’ll be teaching you is what I call Complete Stoicism.

You should leave this episode understanding three things: there is an ongoing disagreement about what counts as Stoicism, you have to accept that right reason is what makes a human being good in order to benefit from the philosophy, and there is a lot more to all this than you probably thought.

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