Episode #236 ... Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

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  Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This.

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  I hope you love the show today.

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  So depending on what your tastes are,

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  you could think that Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the best philosophy book you've ever had the privilege of reading,

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  or you could think it's a book that oversimplifies what it is to be a person on a level that's almost insulting when you read it.

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  I heard both of these takes plenty of times getting emails over the years.

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  But as I always do on this podcast, whenever we're covering anything,

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  Today my job is to make a case for what's amazing about this book, Meditations.

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  I'm going to talk about some of the big ideas from it and hopefully give someone who's reading through it some important context for where Marcus Aurelius was personally at his life when he wrote each of these 12 entries that make up the books of this book.

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  They're called books, not chapters in this case.

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  Should also be said that next episode is going to be on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer's brutal critique of stoicism and how limited they thought the whole thing was.

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  That's another thing we like to do on this podcast.

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  Consider the other side of things.

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  Anyway, that's for next time.

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  Today, as I said, I'm going to be making a real case for stoicism, and a case for why,

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  even if there are some built-in limitations to it,

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  why those limitations may in fact be a big part of the selling point of stoicism,

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  how it's become so popular in the last 15 years or so,

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  what is it about the world we're currently living in that makes the message of stoicism in particular so attractive to people?

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  Let's get right into it.

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