Professor Christopher Gill on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
Professor Christopher Gill on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
University of Exeter, Stoicism Today Project
In this brief video lecture for “Stoicism Today”, Professor Christopher Gill delivers a philosophical paper on the Stoic features of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations — featured also in full in a forthcoming book titled “Marcus Aurelius: Meditations Books 1 to 6” by Oxford University Press. Professor Gill argues that the Meditations properly considered in a “broader scholarly context” illustrates the extent to which Marcus Aurelius was neither an amateur nor an eclectic thinker but a serious stoic thinker in his own right taking stoicism not as a religion but as a serious social philosophy. In short, the argument is that to properly understand the purpose and organization of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, we must properly situate these essential stoic ideas.