Nov. 22nd is when we commemorate Lawrence Becker (1939-2018). He is most known for writing A New Stoicism (1998, 2017), but he was also very busy in advocating for disability rights and contributing to the burgeoning fields of “disability studies” and “philosophy of disability.”
A nice introduction to Becker takes the form of a short talk which he gave for the Post-Polio Health International (PHI) in 2014 titled “Developing a Personal Philosophy about Disability.” Below is the video on YouTube (and here’s a transcript you can use to follow along or read on your own).
This talk is representative of his style of writing, his personality (and sense of humor), and his framing of ethics as a matter of agency. His main contribution to stoic philosophy is his framing of virtue as “ideal agency.” What’s also notable, perhaps, is his self-identification as a “stoic” and his subsequent commitment to developing stoicism as a living philosophy- not something you that just sits there for us to study, but something that changes and grows in response to modern discussions.