Foucault on the Stoics
I think this is the French philosopher Michel Foucault, talking about the Stoics, and how they could provide a 'new ethics' for modern life. I believe the talk is from the early 1980s, shortly before Foucault died. You can read transcripts of these talks (without the goddam pan-pipe music) in the collection of his writings called Ethics. At the end of his life, Foucault read Pierre Hadot's essay, Spiritual Exercises, and was very inspired by it. But he misinterpreted the Stoics, believing that the aim of their exercises was to create a 'beautiful self', in an aesthetic or even Nietzschean way - as Hadot pointed out, this was a mistake. The Stoics don't want to create some beautiful separate self. They want to re-unite the self to cosmic reality, or rather, to God. Anyway, Foucault is still an interesting read, and has helped bring many modern readers to the Stoics.