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Interesting use of the Vulcan psychology and culture. Vulcans dont lack emotions - they have learnt to control them or suppress them.

Great show, guys, as ever. Perhaps if your guest realized we were already respectful of her learned background, she could better target her conversation to the specifics of stoicism.

Thanks for doin what you do

Okay, now that I've watched the whole talk, I'll say again that the video for Book One was excellent, and I hope that you make the videos for Books Two and Three available on CZcams. I think the original reason why we have a CZcams of Book One is that the Zoom version of the video didn't work for some of us, surprisingly enough, and we could watch it only on CZcams. I gather we're going to have Two and Three on CZcams, and I thank you. Lou, as you recall I contacted you via your website about a problem I'm having with your dear friend. You haven't gotten back to me, and I assume you are his devoted ally and therefore, when he told you he wanted nothing to do with me, you stayed mum and never replied to my inquiry. What he did was outrageous and wrong. I think the people who have been most grievously wronged, however, are the Palestinians, not I. He presented a film about Toscanini that was going to show Israel as a beautiful country without saying anything about how Israel drove 750,000 Palestinians out of their own homeland, and has continued to oppress those who still live in that land. It's not complicated or confusing. It's fact, the same way that everything Fernando Sor went through was fact, and indeed this is much clearer and less complicated than any of that. I had asked him to be honest about it. I'll bet you don't want to get involved, but it hurts that your friend should do this. It was mean. Therefore I can't watch any more of his films, because I'm not on his email list anymore, as a punishment for my questioning him about this, and he simply said he didn't want to get into politics and wanted to give people an oasis from the strife we see on TV. I'm not an obnoxious person, someone to avoid. I'm not rude. The truth is well known to many people, and acknowledging it would be in line with what you said in your talk on this video about ethics and responsibility. Netanyahu was caught on video bragging about how he deliberately sabotaged every peace agreement he ever made with the Palestinians. That's in line with what Israel has done all along. It's for a Jewish state for Jews only. The link is contained in a recent article by Juan Cole. We shouldn't look out for our personal comfort as a priority. Of course, what you said in your video about him brought up this whole subject. Yes, he certainly does admirable work, and he does it well. Okay, I've said enough about that for now. Thank you for getting the word out about Fernando Sor. It was a thrilling time in history, very little understood or known.

Thank you.

What a piece of work is Mann

Thank you so much for this very insightful talk! Resilience and handling of emotions is a hot topic in our days, and - as you showed -, had been even back then, in the time of the Stoics!

Listening to this great discussion I started thinking about Arthur Rimbaud, I recently read a biography by I’m Graham Robb and it’s astonishing how seemingly worldly wise he was at such a young age, both of existence and of his cultural context....

Thank you.

Thank you

Thank you

Hi Massimo, I loved your course on the great courses. Thank you!!

This is a wonderful talk. I'm only 7 minutes into it. "Beauty and Goodness are logically equivalent." I've been a fan of Long's for many years - but this exceeds my expectations!

Thanks to all of you for these book club discussions

Peterson . . . "a pseudo-philosophy bullshitter of the first order." I agree. Among others, Nathan Robinson wrote an expose of Peterson's BS in a famous article in Current Affairs: www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve In the article, the illustrations alone are worth the price of admission.

Fascinating discussion and thanks for mentioning my Sentientism article, David! It's been published by Free Inquiry and Sentient media and is also on Sentientism.info if people are interested. The broad-narrow Sentientism distinction is philosophically fascinating and I'm open minded about the answer. Other sentientists disagree too! At the same time, given affect/valence seems to have been central to the evolutionary development of sentience I doubt the debate has much bearing on the trillions of sentient beings that exist today. They ~all seem to have affective, valenced states. Maybe we'll eventually design or evolve or encounter non-affective sentients and these trolley problems will come into their own. In the meantime, I'm more concerned with today's sentient beings (roughly speaking, human and non-human animals). Whether or not we're "broad" or "narrow" Sentientists - we would all agree they warrant moral status. What's more troubling for me than the assignment of moral status is whether or not we take that moral status seriously. To my mind, if the moral status of a sentient being can be ignored or over-ridden because humans take trivial, transient pleasure from harming or killing them, then I'm not sure what we even mean by moral status or moral consideration in the first place. No one would allow me to claim I had any meaningful moral consideration for a human that I chose to kill for fun. So, by all means let's grant moral status and consideration to hypothetical p-zombies and vulcans. I love the generosity of spirit. Surely at the same time we must also grant meaningful moral consideration to all the human and non-human sentient animals we share this planet with, whether we classify them as wild or "farmed" or companions. Yes, now you all need to go vegan. Don't worry - it's never been easier! We'll help :) You'll feel so much better without all that cognitive dissonance!

1:49 to skip to the guest speaker's intro

I'm skeptical he's in a diner.

Thanks so much, Massimo and Chad, and for our discussion at the end. Glad it worked without the video. For anyone who wants to hear Sor's music after the talk, the video on Book One is here: czcams.com/video/dxahhAT6cTY/video.html

Thanks very much for this Massimo. An exceptional conversation.

I couldn't attend it live, thank you very much for uploading it so quickly! It's always great to listen to these discussions and independently of the stage of the stoicism journey you are at the moment (I'm at the beginning) there are always insightful and provoking thoughts. Thanks.

Great Conversation! Thanks

Thank you

Rob is fun to listen listen to!

Thank you

I really enjoyed this and am proud to share it. What a wonderful anniversary to remember and contemplate.

thank you sir for this helpful session.

I wish Prof Wang would write more, I greatly appreciate her work.

I'd be upset this channel has such little exposure, but it's out of my control, so I'll just say thanks instead!

Massimo I finished your book How to Be a Stoic last week. It was great. After diving into Stoicism over the past few months, I'm blown away at how well the system maps on to my own intuitions about living a good life and how it complements my personal weaknesses. Thanks for this great content!

The example at 56:30, about the woman who was on a date and misunderstood food poisoning for falling in love, is from Lisa Feldman Barrett, distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is also Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Harvard University. I loved her book "How emotions are made" for the general public. I wonder what she would think about the Stoic theory of emotions!

Thanks for a very interesting and useful conversation . Plenty of fine detail and points research , consider and practice .

Thank you sir for this great session.

the book struck me as a little shallow and i stopped reading half way. i couldn get the point. Was Al winging it ?

Thank you for uploading

Thank you very much Massimo. Grazie mille😃

This is literally my favorite novel. I've read and listened to the audiobook several times. It really is like reading the Odyssey.

English is limited to one single term or word LOVE which is a singularity and/or unitary expression, unfortunately, for native (English) speakers, whereas all other linguistic groups are not structured as binary two-dimensional forms as Love and Hate.

Hi Massimo, you shared this to me on FB the other day. Do you have any further writing on your arguments against Hume and the is/ought problem? Really enjoyed this and it got me thinking but I feel like I need more explanation. I'd generally put myself in moral subjectivist box but this rocked me a bit. Thanks.

physical science can explain with all concrete meanings, but social science can only demonstrate an old state of some human interactions buy declining them and b. making the subject more grey than black&white with all abstract meanings

I wish I could fully and cleanly hate metaphysics.

I enjoyed this immensely but I thought that Massimo did the very thing that illustrates male entitlement by repeatedly asking Kate to answer a question on moral education to which she had already replied that it was not within the remit of her book nor her area of expertise. I say this with all due respect to the host.

how can I join this book club?

good

Sir I have one req pls don't stop making videos pllss don't stop it..

The book kinda reflected western attitude at the time towards machinery, obviously, it was written during the romantic era of literature in response to the industrial revolution. The religious symbolism in the book is also interesting, I had a teacher who claimed that Christianity slowed the development of robotics in the West: "man shouldn't play God", this theme is present within the book. However, Shintoism in Japan didn't hold these believes since their religion is a form of animism therefore enabling them to develop robotics quicker than in the West.

I'm 5 years late... But it was awesome, thank you very much, much appreciated all the arguments and it helped me to review some point of views.

There seems a fatal flaw in the idea of free will in a block universe with an omniscient god. That is, the god presumably _created_ the entire block universe at once, which includes everything that we "do". It can't be a case of creating the initial big bang conditions and letting the universe "run", since that's not how a block universe works. Past and future all exist concretely. To create the big bang is to create the eventual heat death and all points in between, all together: the complete block universe. If god didn't create the block universe, then he's relegated to a passive observer of a structure he just discovered, nothing like the Christian creator god at all. And if the god did create the block universe, then he is the author, not just the observer, of our actions. And the point about predicting what someone will do ,without influencing them to do it, falls. What they do is just part of the eternal structure of the block universe as it was created, and so completely decided by the creator.

Only 30 mins in but wanted to jump in with two comments while I'm thinking about them; 1) An unintended consequence of the 'kill the philosophical zombies' approach in the trolley problems might be that we start a war between humans and zombies and the resulting death could tip the scales back in the other direction 2) Shouldn't we be weary of our intuitions on questions like this? Obviously evolution has tuned us to consider conscious beings more seriously both for their ability to help us and hurt us and there were no zombies or AIs during our evolution so it makes sense we wouldn't feel anything for them

@32 Yes, corporate "charity" is just a PR expense. As is the cost of publicly patting themselves on the back. Sickening.