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From The Cosmos To Cracks In Bread: Things of Beauty For Stoics
An Invited Talk At The 2023 Stoicon Conference
By contrast to the last two international Stoicons, for which I was a co-organizer and MC, this time around I got to take on a much more limited role. I was invited to give a talk followed by Q&A. The session was recorded, and if you’d like to watch the video of it, here it is:
What you will find below is the transcript, lightly edited, of my talk and of the question and answer period that followed. I hope you find it interesting!
Thanks so much. That’s a very nice introduction, and my talk, you could say, is a little less ambitious than almost everyone that I’ve heard so far. It’s just looking at types of matters that Stoics describe as beautiful. Obviously if you wanted to be comprehensive in this, we’d need a whole seminar, because they say so many things about beauty.
And so many things are beautiful, so we’re just going to look at a selection of examples drawn from the three stoic thinkers that I think almost…