Jay will give a brief presentation on Stoicism and we will get to see some friends from Australia! The meeting will be at the Chipotle near Gammage Theater.
I wish I could attend that. Too bad the once vast Stoic literature survived in fragments, though scholars in recent years have put a lot of effort into inferring its overall structure from what little they have to work with. The Stoics in their prime offered a comprehensive philosophy which addressed everything upper class Greeks and Romans of an intellectual turn cared about, but we have only an inkling of that now because we've inherited a biased sample consisting mainly of popular works of Stoic ethics, like Seneca's Letters and Epictetus' Discourses.
By contrast a lot more of Plato's and Aristotle's works have come down to us. Their over-representation in post-Roman Western culture gives a distorted picture of how men in Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial antiquity understood philosophy. I keep hoping that archeologists will find complete works by Chrysippus some day to fill in the huge gaps in our understanding of Stoicism.
Stoicism is indeed a very comprehensive and rich philosophy of life (and perhaps easier to make coherent with modern natural and social science than Zen Buddhism or Objectivism), but I don't plan on talking about Stoicism as such (which IMO, is slightly off-topic for a Less Wrong meetup, but also extremely interesting to me personally). Instead, I will only be discussing a few of the psychological hacks first written down by the Roman Stoics that seem justified on evolutionary psychological grounds.
Jay will give a brief presentation on Stoicism and we will get to see some friends from Australia! The meeting will be at the Chipotle near Gammage Theater.