Back to the Stoic Foundation Home Page

THE STOIC FOUNDATION

About the Stoic Foundation Correspondence Course

Introduction to Stoic Philosophy: The Quest for Inner Peace

Through the Stoic Foundation website, I have been offering this course with full tutor support since 1999, replying in detail to students’ exercises in some depth. Alas, because of my other more pressing commitments, I am no longer able to offer the course in this thoroughgoing way. (But please see this note, below.)

For those who would like to work through the course without tutor support, the Stoic Foundation’s correspondence course is now available as a paperback book, Stoic Serenity: A Practical Course on Finding Inner Peace. It is available from all major Internet bookstores, and can be ordered from any high street bookstore in the usual way, quoting ISBN 978-1-84753-817-8. The book is available directly from the publisher’s site at Lulu.com, and from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

This book contains all the course papers from the correspondence course, but also features extra material, including sample responses to students’ written assignments, two essays on determinism and the passions, and more.

The Course is designed to have practical application to daily living, just as a course in Stoic Philosophy would have had in ancient times. The Course is not technical, and is suitable for people with no prior knowledge of philosophy. From the very start, the emphasis is on encouraging students to begin living a life that is eudaimôn, which is the term the ancient Greek philosophers used for ‘lived well’, or ‘flourishing’ or ‘happy’. It was in this sense that the ancient philosophers sought the ‘good life’, and this Introduction to Stoic Philosophy, although not guaranteeing to anyone a life of perfect bliss, will give you the tools to think more carefully about what really matters and why, and will give you techniques for living the eudaimôn life.

Students working through Stoic Serenity: A Practical Course on Finding Inner Peace will engage with practical exercises right from the start. Stoic philosophy does not tell you about life, but shows you ways to live life in a more satisfactory way.

On this course, you will be asked to read selections from two ancient Stoic writers. These are:

Seneca: Letters from a Stoic [ = ‘Moral Letters’], translated by Robin Campbell, Penguin Books.

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, translated by Robin Hard, Wordsworth Editions.

It is essential that you acquire your own copies of these two books. They should be readily available from most booksellers, or from Internet bookstores, including my own Amazon bookstores. Please use these links:

As a temporary measure, you will find Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations here and the complete text of Seneca’s Moral Letters here. If the Robin Hard translation of the Meditations is not available, my personal preference for a substitute is the G. M. A. Grube translation from Hackett, which of course is also available at the usual bookstores.

PLEASE NOTE: I am always happy to receive emails from anyone about any aspect of Stoic living, and from anyone who has a query about something in Stoic Serenity: A Practical Course on Finding Inner Peace, or in my Routledge book Epictetus’ Handbook and the Tablet of Cebes: Guides to Stoic Living. Please email me using the link below.