1You shall observe to do all the commandments which I command you today, that you may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which Yahweh swore to your fathers. 2You shall remember all the way which Yahweh your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, to prove you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not. 3He humbled you, and allowed you to be hungry, and fed you with manna, which you didn’t know, neither did your fathers know; that he might teach you that man does not live by bread only, but man lives by every word that proceeds out of Yahweh’s mouth. 4Your clothing didn’t grow old on you, neither did your foot swell, these forty years. 5You shall consider in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so Yahweh your God disciplines you. 6You shall keep the commandments of Yahweh your God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him. 7For Yahweh your God brings you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of springs, and underground water flowing into valleys and hills; 8a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey; 9a land in which you shall eat bread without scarceness, you shall not lack anything in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you may dig copper. 10You shall eat and be full, and you shall bless Yahweh your God for the good land which he has given you.
Moses speaks to a people who have spent years walking through uncertainty and are about to enter a place of plenty. He asks them to remember how they were led, humbled, and fed along the way. Abundance can tempt us to believe we built everything ourselves, so the passage points to gratitude and obedience as quiet habits that keep us grounded. It is a good reminder that the slow, ordinary stretches of life often teach more than the destination does.
"Suppose that a foolish man has seized hold of a plank from a sinking ship, shall a wise man wrest it away from him if he can?" "No," says Hecaton; "for that would be unjust." "But how about the owner of the ship? Shall he take the plank away because it belongs to him?" "Not at all; no more than he would be willing when far out at sea to throw a passenger overboard on the ground that the ship was his. For until they reach the place for which the ship is chartered, she belongs to the passengers, not to the owner."
Walter Miller, 1913
Hecato of Rhodes was a Stoic of the late second and early first century BC and a pupil of Panaetius. He wrote a work on moral duties that is now lost. We know it only through quotations, mainly in Cicero's De Officiis (written in 44 BC) and in Seneca's letters and essays. Cicero reports Hecato's shipwreck case in Book 3, which deals with conflicts between the right and the expedient. He cites it as an example of the practical questions Hecato asked, and he is not fully satisfied with how Hecato answered some of them.
Hecato's answer is that ownership does not give you every right. A shipowner may hold the title to the vessel, but once he has taken on passengers, he has taken on duties to them as well. Most of us have a smaller version of this problem: a manager with power over a team, or a landlord with a tenant, or a driver on a road shared with others. The Stoic point is that what the law lets us do and what justice asks of us are different questions, and a decent person asks the second one first. The passage also reminds us that Stoicism was practical. Its teachers tested their principles against awkward, concrete cases like this one.
PracticeToday, think of one place where you hold some power or advantage, such as a role at work, a shared space, or a favor owed to you. Before you use it, ask whether you have a right to do so and also whether it is just to the people affected. If the two answers differ, act on the second.
A 2,300-year-old stroll ends in a clever trick with one word, and philosophers are still arguing about it.
Two friends are walking on a bridge over the Hao River, in China, around the fourth century BCE. Below them, small minnows dart out and cruise about. Zhuangzi, the Daoist, remarks that the fish are happy. His companion Hui Shi, a famous logician, objects at once: you are not a fish, so how can you know what fish enjoy?
Zhuangzi answers in kind. You are not me, so how do you know that I don't know it? Hui Shi springs the trap he thinks he has built. He is not Zhuangzi, so he cannot say what Zhuangzi knows. But Zhuangzi is certainly not a fish, so the case against him is complete. If one mind cannot see into another, nobody can ever know that an animal is happy.
Zhuangzi doesn't try to refute this. He asks Hui Shi to go back to the start. The Chinese word in the original question, an, can mean "how" or "from where." Zhuangzi says that when Hui Shi asked "from where do you know?", he was already taking it for granted that Zhuangzi knew. So Zhuangzi answers the second meaning: he knows it from here, standing above the Hao.
Scholars disagree about what he means. Some read it as a pun that beats Hui Shi on a technicality. Others read it as a claim that knowing can come from shared experience, with no proof of inner states needed. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Hui Shi appears in the book mostly as a plain foil for Zhuangzi, and that the friendship may be a literary device. The debate was never really about fish. It asks whether we can know another creature's feelings, and what "know" should mean when we ask.
RememberHui Shi's "you are not a fish" argument proves too much, since it would also show that you can never know a friend's mind, and Zhuangzi's reply asks what kind of knowing we mean.
Read nextRoger T. Ames and Takahiro Nakajima (eds.), Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "School of Names: Life of Hui Shi" and "Zhuangzi"