Modern Stoicism

Modern Stoicism is an intellectual and popular movement in the late 20th and early 21st century which attempts to revive the Stoic philosophy in the modern setting. It is not to be confused with Neostoicism, an analogous phenomenon in the 17th century. The term "Modern Stoicism" covers both the revival of interest in the Stoic philosophy and the philosophical efforts to adjust Ancient Stoicism to the language and conceptual framework of the present. 'The rise of Modern Stoicism' has received attention in the international media since around November 2012 when the first Annual Stoic Week event was organized.

Modern Stoicism has developed in the context of the 20th century surge of interest in virtue ethics in general. "The [...] work by philosophers like Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum, among others, has brought back virtue ethics as a viable alternative to the dominant Kantian-deontological and utilitarian-consequentialist approaches." Modern Stoicism draws a lot from the late 20th and early 21st century spike in publications of scholarly works on ancients Stoics, from new translations of the classical works. Beyond that, “the Modern Stoicism movement traces its roots to the work of Dr Albert Ellis, who developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy as well as Aaron T. Beck who is regarded by many as the father to early versions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Victor Frankl also found stoicism useful in assisting him during the war, he later developed his theory known as Logotherapy

One major premise of Modern Stoicism can be expressed as, in Lawrence Becker's words, "it is interesting to try to imagine what might have happened if Stoicism had had a continuous twenty-three-hundred-year history; if Stoics had had to confront Bacon and Descartes, Newton and Locke, Hobbes and Bentham, Hume and Kant, Darwin and Marx." Or, as Massimo Pigliucci puts it more concisely, "it is worth considering what it means to 'be a Stoic' in the 21st century."

The major work that spelled out the key premises of Modern Stoicism is, arguably, A New Stoicism by Lawrence Becker, first published in 1997. For other important books, see the notable books section below.

Stoic philosophy was the original philosophical inspiration for modern cognitive psychotherapy, particularly as mediated by Dr Albert Ellis' Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), the major precursor of CBT. The original cognitive therapy treatment manual for depression by Aaron T. Beck et al. states, "The philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers". A well-known quotation fromThe Handbook of Epictetus was taught to most clients during the initial session of traditional REBT by Ellis and his followers: "It's not the events that upset us, but our judgments about the events." This subsequently became a common element in the "socialization" phase of many other approaches to CBT. The question of Stoicism's influence on modern psychotherapy, particularly REBT and CBT, was described in detail in The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (2010) by Donald Robertson. Moreover, several early 20th century psychotherapists were influenced by stoicism, most notably the "rational persuasion" school founded by the Swiss neurologist and psychotherapist Paul DuBois, who drew heavily on Stoicism in his clinical work and encouraged his clients to study passages from Seneca as homework assignments.

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