Boethius Improved Stoicism

My Conversation w/Professor. Tom Ward on the Last Roman Philosopher

Dr. Tom Ward came back on my podcast, Parker's Pensées, today. It was awesome. But rather than talking abstract objects and the mind of God like we have several times in the past, we talked about his new book After Stoicism, instead.

After Stoicism is about the last words of the last Roman philosopher, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius. Boethius was an absolute giant of a philosopher, giving us Latin translations of many of the works of Aristotle, formulating the 7 liberal arts--the trivium and the quadrivium-- and leaving us with a beautiful self-reflexive cross between a Platonic or sacred dialogue and an Augustinian philosophical soliloquy, called The Consolation of Philosophy.

Grab After Stoicism here to support my work and grab The Consolation of Philosophy here.

Ward's After Stoicism is a really erudite book, yet he manages to still write for a non-specialist audience. I'm not sure how he did that but I bet teaching Boethius's magnum opus in his philosophy courses foelr years and year helped.

The Consolation is one of my favorite books so I had a lot of fun chopping it up with professor Ward--especially since my in-progress science fiction novel is so heavily influenced by The Consolation.

After our podcast episode, we talked a bit about how he uses notebooks to form his ideas and write his books and journal articles and yes, I recorded it! I need to edit it a bit for the ParkNotes YouTube channel but look for that one soon as well.

Watch the podcast episode here: