Oct 16, 2026 · 1 hr 18 min · 10 segments
In this seminar, Professor Gareth Williams (Columbia) explores how the Roman philosopher-politician, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 2 BCE-65 CE), reflects in his Latin philosophical writings on the value…
This is deeply problematic because if you go from one plus, i.e. positive one, to one minus and there's nothing in between, how on a spectrum will you ever point to a single point of zero time? Philosophers got deep into the weeds of this problem, and Seneca's very aware of it as well, as I'll perhaps point out in my little handout.
[laughs]
Why? And why should a Stoic be concerned about the nature of time? Isn't it so commonplace that we all worry about time and life, and doesn't Horace tell us that we should carpe diem, as it were, seize the moment? What more can Seneca tell us that we don't know already about time? But what I want to suggest to you about that, first of all, is that a Stoic philosopher is a very particular breed of creature.
[laughs]
Stoics, Stoicism, and I, I don't mean to repeat things that are known to many of you already.
Stoicism was born in about the third century BCE by a wonderfully eccentric character called Zeno of Citium, who was a great fan of polygamy and of cannibalism.
[laughs]
But Stoicism, this very elaborate philosophy that grew up at the same time as Epicureanism, it flowed out of the great reservoir of Aristotelianism or Platonism in ways that are extremely deep and searching.
But oddly enough, even though Stoicism and Epicureanism are such complex thought systems, they begin from the simplest of questions about life.
What they want to ask is: How can I be happy? How can I live in a way that gives me tranquility for as much of my existence as I can muster? From that simple question, Stoics and Epicureans went in very different directions, but both of them came up with elaborate answers and different physical systems of the world to answer questions about peace of mind.
He, as a Roman Stoic, comes in what is generally thought nowadays as the late Stoic period.
This is deeply problematic because if you go from one plus, i.e. positive one, to one minus and there's nothing in between, how on a spectrum will you ever point to a single point of zero time? Philosophers got deep into the weeds of this problem, and Seneca's very aware of it as well, as I'll perhaps point out in my little handout.
[laughs]
Why? And why should a Stoic be concerned about the nature of time? Isn't it so commonplace that we all worry about time and life, and doesn't Horace tell us that we should carpe diem, as it were, seize the moment? What more can Seneca tell us that we don't know already about time? But what I want to suggest to you about that, first of all, is that a Stoic philosopher is a very particular breed of creature.
[laughs]
Stoics, Stoicism, and I, I don't mean to repeat things that are known to many of you already.
Stoicism was born in about the third century BCE by a wonderfully eccentric character called Zeno of Citium, who was a great fan of polygamy and of cannibalism.
[laughs]
But Stoicism, this very elaborate philosophy that grew up at the same time as Epicureanism, it flowed out of the great reservoir of Aristotelianism or Platonism in ways that are extremely deep and searching.
But oddly enough, even though Stoicism and Epicureanism are such complex thought systems, they begin from the simplest of questions about life.
What they want to ask is: How can I be happy? How can I live in a way that gives me tranquility for as much of my existence as I can muster? From that simple question, Stoics and Epicureans went in very different directions, but both of them came up with elaborate answers and different physical systems of the world to answer questions about peace of mind.
He, as a Roman Stoic, comes in what is generally thought nowadays as the late Stoic period.
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