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Get Your Tickets to Stoicon 2016 in New York!

6/27/2016

STOICON is an annual meeting of people interested in exploring Stoicism as a philosophy of life. It is part of a series of public activities related to Stoicism, centered around the Stoicism Today and Stoic Week initiatives.

This is the first time the event has been held in the US. The conference will take place in New York City on October 15, 2016. The 2016 edition of STOICON is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy of the City University of New York and the K.D. Irani Fund for philosophy.

For more information about STOICON 2016, click here.

Registration and tickets, click here.

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6 Tips For Teaching Yourself Philosophy

6/20/2016

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I have published a new guest post at Brainfodder.org. Philosophy can often be really hard to read, so here is some practical advice to make teaching yourself philosophy a bit easier. It's extremely rewarding to expand your philosophical knowledge and hopefully grow in wisdom as well.

Brain Fodder has some consistently great content that you may want to check out.

Enjoy!

You May Also Like:
Understanding and Applying Stoic Ethics In Modern Life
Critical Thinking: The Basics
21 Traits of A Good Character

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Time Line of Stoic Philosophy 500 BCE - 200 CE

6/13/2016

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Enjoy my new inforgraphic history of Stoic philosophy! In addition to listing all of the major Stoic figures, I have also included the philosophers who most heavily influenced Zeno during the founding of the Stoic School. The timeline outlines some relevant facts about each philosopher, plus interesting quotations and trivia. I omitted some of the minor Stoic philosophers, a good overview of which can be found here at the Philosophy of CBT website.

Please share this infographic on Pinterest and with your other social media networks!

You can now follow Common Sense Ethics on Twitter and via email using the email opt-in form at the top right. Sign up for email updates and don't miss a post!

You May Also Like:

Understanding and Applying Stoic Ethics In Modern Life
Top 5 Lessons Learned From Stoic Week 2015
Are You Suffering From Negative Socialization? The Stoic Philosopher Musonius Rufus Can Help Free Your Mind

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When Being Too Nice Could Get You Killed

6/6/2016

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What does being a nice person mean to you? Virtue ethicists believe that politeness is the basis of all moral interactions. I think of niceness as a synonym for being a kind, helpful, good-natured, pro-social person, and also as a general way of approaching the world and avoiding interpersonal conflict. But what if being nice doesn't always work so well? What if predatory people use niceness to entrap the unsuspecting? What if being too polite to the wrong person could even get you killed?

Gavin De Becker is a former law enforcement officer who has developed a compelling hypothesis about the "wild brain." De Becker virtually stands alone in the field of risk management because of his unique hypothesis about the psychology of human conflict and predation based on case studies from his career.

Violence, although relatively rare in much of the developed world, is a part of the human condition. It is not going away any time soon. According to De Becker, millions of years of evolution have equipped us with the intuitive ability to detect pre-attack indicators when violence is imminent, or when we are in danger.

Philosophers spend a lot of time using reason. Reason is the much celebrated but slow, plodding, methodical product of left brained thinking. It is wonderful for tackling complex problems and for everyday use, but not great at handling immediate threats to our safety and well being. According to De Becker, we have another, primal, lighting fast mental faculty for avoiding danger - intuition.

Not so happily for us, humans are the only animals in nature who routinely ignore intuitive hits about danger in our environments, often using reason to deconstruct what our intuition is telling us - sometimes with devastating consequences. Here is how to harness the protective gift of intuition that we have inherited from the wild brain of our ancestors.

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