Stoicism and your needs

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All sounds great. I'm lucky enough that my sensory divergence helps me sort of meditate naturally. What trips me up especially is any kind of conflict, surprises, and long days with more public activity than I prefer.

I enjoyed your posts. I just want to to mention one or two things.

Supposedly, Vulcan culture reflects the state of the field of psychology at the time Star Trek was created. Today, there has been research showing that people are not remotely logical. I am sure that is easily brushed aside but I think it is true. The state of psychology has changed since the sixties.

As far as the Greeks and the Romans having the first philosophy to influence the world, doesn’t eastern philosophy have a similar timeline? I wouldn’t mind having someone elaborate on that.

I think Zeus’s rational plan and cause and effect is closely tied up in their notion of virtue. I seem to remember reading that. It is not as simple as the 5 cardinal virtues that stand alone. I do like the simplicity of the cardinal virtues. Sorry for going off on my own tangent.

Those are both interesting tangents, for me at least. In the mid-20th century, American academic philosophy was largely dominated by a rather rigid orthodoxy of analytic philosophy, which was very devoted to mathematical logic. Influenced by that, the original strategy of AI from 1956 was pretty much to do it all with first-order logic. Digital logic was also just beginning to take off. So yes, the spirit of the times was ripe for depiction of a logic-worshipping culture.

The second question is huge, so I'll try to be brief. First, we have to distinguish what we mean by philosophy. Second, stereotyped accounts of Western civilization as a continuous progress from Greece to Western Europe are defective, for multiple reasons. Third, texts like the Hindu Upanishads are already relatively free of mythology, and older than any Greek philosophy. Fourth, all large generalizations in this area are subject to potentially intense debate.

A few decades ago, I probably would have put the first philosophy somewhere in remote prehistory, entwined with shamanism, cave paintings, and the world's later traditions of painted pottery designs.

But I have come to identify philosophy more closely with a certain tradition of open-ended critical inquiry, in a broadly secular context. That doesn't at all mean those other, less secular traditions don't have value. They're just doing a different thing, in what I would call a more poetic vein. Specifically secular inquiry does seem to take a major leap forward in Greece. And at least in terms of what is historically documented, Socrates' identification of wisdom with recognizing what we do not know is unprecedented.

But even as late as Roman times, Greece was regarded by everyone in the West as part of the East. Greek culture developed its unique character due to extensive cross-cultural exchange in the eastern Mediterranean. Some aspects, like the notion of city-states, go back at least to the Sumerians. Even in Roman times, the language of philosophy was mainly Greek, not Latin. Afterward, its main continuity was via Egypt and Syria, and later, Iraq and Islamic Spain. There is a lot we don't know about further contact along what became the Silk Road, but clearly there was also some mutual influence between the Mediterranean and Asia, at least from the time of Alexander the Great's conquest of Iran and Afghanistan, if not earlier.

Are the Upanishads philosophy? Good arguments can be made on both sides. The reason I would use some other word is that although the point of view expressed is very sophisticated, it is basically presented in the form "Here is the truth".

Another nuance is that Plato and Aristotle are regarded by many as deeper philosophers than the Stoics, and they were earlier. But their main social influence came only long after their deaths, and I would argue it was never as large. The early Stoicism of Zeno and Chrysippus (whose writings do not survive) spread much faster, in part due to its simpler, more "dogmatic" (though still very rational) form. For a while, Stoicism took the place of traditional religion for many people. At a later point, this also happened to an extent with neoplatonism, but that was more esoteric, and had narrower appeal. Then any philosophy associated with significant inquiry became largely submerged in the West for many centuries, not to really re-emerge until the later middle ages.

Yes, the Stoics prided themselves very much on the tight integration of their system. Ethics, logic, and physics were all connected. So for instance, they saw nature as largely governed by embedded reason-principles or logos. A key part of their ethics was to follow the dictates of reason, and they believed in a sort of natural law for both cause and effect and ethics. These ideas experienced a revival in the Enlightenment.