This is a condensed extract from Massimo Pigliucci’s excellent personal tribute to Larry Becker in patreon.com/footnotes to Plato. 

Prof. Lawrence Becker, the author of A New Stoicism has recently passed away. I met Larry in early 2016, right at the beginning of my sabbatical leave that resulted in the writing of How to Be a Stoic, my first book on Stoicism. 

The basic info about Larry as a philosopher is nicely summarized in a brief obituary that appeared in Daily Nous: PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1965, taught at Hollins College, VA, until 1989, then William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in the Humanities as well as Professor of Philosophy at the College of William and Mary, where he retired in 2001. 

Larry didn’t write just about Stoicism, though A New Stoicism is a landmark that has helped immensely to both put modern Stoicism on the map and update the philosophy in a creative and yet philosophically rigorous way. Together with his loving wife, Charlotte B. Becker, Larry edited the monumental (2,020 pages) Encyclopedia of Ethics for Routledge. 

I last spoke to Larry just a couple of weeks before he died. His wife had recently passed away. He told me he had had first hand experience of what Epictetus meant when he said that we should whisper goodnight to our loved ones in full knowledge that they may not be there the following day. That thought gave comfort to Larry, and it comforts me now that he is gone.

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Massimo Pigliucci 

 

 

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