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Luc Lalande's avatar

Excellent and timely piece. Related supplemental reading: "Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/08/empathy-sin-christian-right-musk-trump

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Benny's avatar

A good read, thank you. I had similar thoughts re: Vance's bastardization of Augustine and Augustine basically repeating Hierocles-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off. I know that in my readings of oikeiôsis the final circle was always considered "the Gods and Nature" (most probably from a reading of Cicero) so I always felt that the popular portrayals of that paradigm were particularly secularized and human-centric. I don't disagree with Whiting & Konstantakos at all in their position of the natural world ("Stoic Theology" was a great paper, in my opinion), but it's sad that we have to make the argument for Stoics to care about the wider world around them.

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