Hugin & Munin Journal

As a child, I was convinced that the Swedish word for Stoic— stoisk —had something to do with sto , a mare. I pictured a philosophy modelled on the patient, steady temperament of a mother horse. The connection was imaginary. The Swedish Academy’s historical dictionary traces stoisk through Latin and Greek to stoa , a colonnade or portico. The philosophical school took its name from the Stoa Poikile, the painted colonnade in Athens where its early teachers gathered. It was a trivial misunderstanding, but an oddly appropriate one. Stoicism has acquired another false identity: coldness, rigidity and the suppression of anything recognisably emotional. William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy works against that caricature by presenting Stoicism as a set of practices for reducing needless anxiety, dissatisfaction and dependence on events outside our control. That practical focus is why the book works. It is also where its limits begin. Irvine is not...