Stoicism Updated

A new revised edition of my 2006 book Stoicism is now coming out with Routledge; further details here. 

So, what’s new about it? What has been changed? In brief, the core of the book - Chapters 2-5 - are largely the same, as I was reasonably happy with them and they had been received well. The largest revisions were to Chapters 1 and 6, which have changed quite a bit. 

In the original edition I was least happy with Chapter 1. The section on the loss of Stoic texts, which was a bit too speculative, has been dropped, and the introductions to individual Stoics have been expanded, especially in the light of work I’ve done on the Roman Stoics since 2006. 

The original Chapter 6 was very much my first attempt to sketch out the subsequent influence of Stoic ideas and since then I’ve done quite a bit of work on this topic (see here), as well as editing The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition. So I’ve rewritten most of this chapter in the light of all this more recent work. 

Throughout the rest of the text I’ve made a few tweaks and updates here and there. I have replaced ‘non-preferred’ with ‘dis-preferred’ as a translation of apoproegmenon, as that seems better to capture the idea. I have also avoided references to apatheia in the light of recent work that has questioned how helpful this term is in relation to the Stoa (see here). I’ve also taken a more critical stance towards the idea that Epictetus’ three topoi might map onto the three parts of Stoic philosophy (see my change of mind here). In short, I’ve brought everything up to date and in line with my current thinking about Stoicism, which has developed and - I hope - improved over the last two decades. The guide to further reading has also been updated to include references to some of the most important work published since the book first came out. 

As time went by I became less inclined to recommend the book because I was conscious of a few things I no longer fully agreed with; now I can comfortably say that there's nothing in it I don’t stand by today. I was also conscious that over time the price of the book had increased to a level that I thought was excessive. I’m very pleased that Routledge have managed to re-issue it at a more sensible price.