Ten Virtues for the Modern Age. The Virtues Project comes as a response to the wave of discussion and feedback that followed the publication of my book, Religion for Atheists, and a growing sense that being virtuous has become a strange and depressing notion, while wickedness and evil bask in a peculiar kind of glamour. My ultimate aim for the project is that it ignites a vital conversation around moral character to increase public interest in becoming more virtuous and connected as a society. In the modern world, the idea of trying to be a ‘good person’ conjures up all sorts of negative associations: of piety, solemnity, bloodlessness and sexual renunciation, as if goodness were something one would try to embrace only when other more difficult but more fulfilling avenues had been exhausted. Throughout history, societies have been interested in fostering virtues, in training us to be more virtuous, but we're one of the first generations to have zero public interest in this. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
James Stockdale. Stockdale was the highest-ranking naval officer held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was awarded 26 personal combat decorations, including the Medal of Honor and four Silver Stars. During the late 1970s, he served as President of the Naval War College. Stockdale was candidate for Vice President of the United States in the 1992 presidential election, on Ross Perot's independent ticket. Early life and education[edit] Stockdale was born in Abingdon, Illinois on December 23, 1923, the son of Mabel Edith (née Bond) and Vernon Beard Stockdale.[1] Following a brief period at Monmouth College, he entered the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland in 1943. Career[edit] Shortly after graduating, Stockdale reported to Naval Air Station Pensacola, in Florida, for flight training. In 1959, the U.S. Vietnam War[edit] Gulf of Tonkin Incident[edit] Stockdale exiting his A-4 fighter-bomber weeks before becoming a POW.
Prisoner of war[edit] In a business book by James C. Stockdale then added: The Gulag Archipelago. The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG) is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Soviet forced labour camp system. The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968, it was published in the West in 1973, thereafter circulating in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the Russian literary journal, Novy Mir in 1989, in which a third of the work was published over three issues.[1] GULag or Gulág is an acronym for the Russian term Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovyh Lagerey (Главное Управление Исправительно-трудовых Лагерей), or "Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps", the bureaucratic name of the governing board of the Soviet labour camp system, and by metonymy, the camp system itself.
Structure and factual basis[edit] Publication[edit] New Stoa. Rick Heller - Reviving Stoic Practice. Print This Article by Rick Heller "We are currently planning our First Annual Marcus Aurelius Convention to commemorate his birthday (April 26) in San Diego Erik Wiegardt is the founder of New Stoa, a contemporary Stoic community that seeks to revive the ancient philosophy of Stoicism as a living practice. Unlike the communities discussed in Emily Cadik's article, Come Together, the Stoic community, which encourages Deism, is not strictly speaking a secular humanist community.
But there is a certain amount of overlap, and knowledge to be discovered through dialogue. TNH: What can secular humanists learn and apply from the philosophy of Stoicism? Wiegardt: Nothing. I would venture to say that all Stoics are humanists, even though not all humanists are Stoics. The starting point of our ethics is actually based upon our physics. TNH: What did the ancient Stoics believe about the gods and the afterlife?
Wiegardt: Largely the same as what contemporary Stoics believe. We are pantheists. Stoicism. Stoicism Stoicism initially emerged as a reaction against philosophical Hedonism which supports the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. For a strict Hedonist, nothing that provides pleasure can be bad. The happy life contains the most possible pleasure, and the least possible pain. One primary difference between philosophical Hedonism and the instinctive pursuit of immediate pleasure is the notion that although most people think they know what they need to be happy, a cursory look around shows that most of us don't. Aristippus was the archetype of strict Hedonism - the meaning of life is pleasure. Aristippus held that the pleasure of the moment is better because the future may never come, or things may be different in the future.
Epicureanism was a refinement of strict Hedonism. Cynicism was a revolt against the rigidly ordered philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, but it admired Socrates. Stoics accepted the Cynic premise that excessive wanting always leads to unhappiness.