Call with Maria Salazar — 2026-07-14

Asked her about apatheia. She says the "indifference to emotion" reading is a
common mistake, and that it comes straight from the English cognate — apathy.
Apatheia is freedom from the pathe, the destructive passions. The Stoics kept
the eupatheiai, the "good feelings": joy, caution, wishing. So it isn't the
absence of feeling. It's the absence of being ruled by it.

She suggested framing the essay on the dichotomy of control instead of on
apatheia. Her argument: apatheia needs a paragraph of disambiguation every time
you use it — I just proved that myself — while the dichotomy lands immediately
with someone who has never opened a Stoic text.

She's teaching the Hellenistic ethics seminar this term.

She's also quietly looking to move departments and asked me not to spread it.
