I finally found time to read your text, Massimo. I agree with you. I had the opportunity to listen to the podcast with Stankiewicz in Polish, and even in Polish it was incomprehensible and quite chaotic for me. thanks for your great text and organizing all this disharmonious vision of Stankiewicz.
Thanks very much for this article. In the past I have listened to presentations by Staniewicz and found them incomprehensible, so I looked forward to your article with particular interest. In short, I think you have saved me a lot of time and effort that I can more usefully direct elsewhere in my Stoic development.
There are three things in your account of Reformed Stoicism that give me a bit of a negative knee jerk reaction - sort of alarm bells ringing - is this sensible / does this make sense?. First Staniewiez rejects the notion of being able to access truth at all. I am reminded of the pyrrhonists, who seem to me to extend their basic idea into a tangled web that does not repay the effort to understand it. Second, as a fan of Cicero and his arguments for the honourable and the expedient, I find it hard to swallow the idea of usefulnes as a core principle of what is a virtuous action.
Third, the list of 13 principles: is this yours Massimo, or is it from Staniewicz's book? I am struck by how negative most of the principles are; they are largely stated as what RS is not!
Perhaps to help me finally decide whether or not RS is worth more of my time and effort, it would be helpful to have a worked example of a problem that shows an analysis and conclusion according to the principles of usefulness. Is there one you could pull from the book? Then I might be able to better understand the rationale of RS. Thanks.
Thanks, Massimo, for another great article in this series! I hadn't heard about Stankiewicz's version of Stoicism before.
One thing that puzzles me in his 13 principles is the point about the “vanity argument”. Is that basically saying “we believe that human activities matter”? If so, it seems a bit odd to me that it is phrased as “R.S. withdraws from the vanity arguments” as if classical Stoicism were endorsing them.
I finally found time to read your text, Massimo. I agree with you. I had the opportunity to listen to the podcast with Stankiewicz in Polish, and even in Polish it was incomprehensible and quite chaotic for me. thanks for your great text and organizing all this disharmonious vision of Stankiewicz.
Thanks very much for this article. In the past I have listened to presentations by Staniewicz and found them incomprehensible, so I looked forward to your article with particular interest. In short, I think you have saved me a lot of time and effort that I can more usefully direct elsewhere in my Stoic development.
There are three things in your account of Reformed Stoicism that give me a bit of a negative knee jerk reaction - sort of alarm bells ringing - is this sensible / does this make sense?. First Staniewiez rejects the notion of being able to access truth at all. I am reminded of the pyrrhonists, who seem to me to extend their basic idea into a tangled web that does not repay the effort to understand it. Second, as a fan of Cicero and his arguments for the honourable and the expedient, I find it hard to swallow the idea of usefulnes as a core principle of what is a virtuous action.
Third, the list of 13 principles: is this yours Massimo, or is it from Staniewicz's book? I am struck by how negative most of the principles are; they are largely stated as what RS is not!
Perhaps to help me finally decide whether or not RS is worth more of my time and effort, it would be helpful to have a worked example of a problem that shows an analysis and conclusion according to the principles of usefulness. Is there one you could pull from the book? Then I might be able to better understand the rationale of RS. Thanks.
Thanks, Massimo, for another great article in this series! I hadn't heard about Stankiewicz's version of Stoicism before.
One thing that puzzles me in his 13 principles is the point about the “vanity argument”. Is that basically saying “we believe that human activities matter”? If so, it seems a bit odd to me that it is phrased as “R.S. withdraws from the vanity arguments” as if classical Stoicism were endorsing them.