Articles by Andrew Bibb
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The Intellectual Ground of Contentment
True contentment is not the product of quiet circumstances. Witherspoon shows that it is generated when desires contrary to the love, fear, and trust…
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The Caricature of Legalism
Rule-keeping that becomes an end in itself is legalism—a caricature of true morality grounded in social norms rather than the law of nature and the…
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Forming Contentment Within Our Own Breasts
While the disciplined soul must sometimes subordinate or even relinquish good things for the sake of better ones, true contentment is frequently…
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The Error of Self-Sufficiency
While the ancient pagan philosophers rightly insisted that moral excellence requires disciplined effort, they frequently overstated man’s…
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The Fearlessness of a Clear Conscience
One act of duty performed purely for conscience’ sake revives the spirit more powerfully than indulgence, diversion, or company because it aligns the…
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Epictetus on Patience: Why Real Moral Growth Takes Time
Real moral growth cannot be rushed. As Epictetus teaches, the fruit of the human mind, like a fig, must first blossom, then ripen. Patient…
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Virtue, Not Office: Boethius on Honor Amid Injustice
True honor flows from the virtue you bring to a role, not from the role itself. Boethius teaches that virtue is good in itself and is the only thing…
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Pietas Is Power
Real power is not domination of others but self-mastery. Cultivating pietas — duty fused with contentment — aligns us with moral reality, starves…
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Our Reason for Being
Cicero’s claim is that we are not born for ourselves alone, but to do good to one another. Even moral relativists expect authority to serve the good…
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The Real War: Pietas vs. Hubris
Unlike a simulation, the moral law cannot be rewritten to suit preference. Butler’s point is that we are born under virtue as natural law. The real…
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On Exercising Contentment
Progress is not dumb-bells on the shelf or treatises perused; it is how we manage desire, aversion, and events. Contentment is a daily discipline…
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Why Philosophy Matters
The philosophy Project Pietas concerns is not abstract detachment but actionable knowledge of human nature and duty — the line of Socrates, the…
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Freedom Through Conscience
When public opinion or external markers of success outrank conscience, we become slaves to forces we neither control nor fully trust. Epictetus’s…
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The Gateway to Clarity
Asserting “my truth” as fact is a prison of prejudice and imagined expertise. Cook’s counsel is to seek clearness first, not orthodoxy under the name…
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The Most Human Things
Survival, physics, and even logic are not uniquely human. What is uniquely human is the sense of oughtness — that things and we ought to be a certain…
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It's Good to Be Picky
Respect is owed widely; trust is not. The soul is malleable and takes the shape of those we constantly admit. Xenophon’s warning stands: mingle with…
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Duty Requires Community
Contentment can be learned in isolation, but most duty is service to others. Witherspoon’s correlative of rights and obligations makes community…
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Soulcraft Rhythms
We keep the body, teeth, and closest relationships by deliberate rhythm; the soul needs the same. Neglect of soulcraft undercuts every other area of…
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Realistic Gratitude
Realistic gratitude is not performative politeness. It is a sober assessment of favors received and a response of the moral sense: we are bound in…
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Grateful Successors
Gratitude for the philosophical foundation we inherit is not mere sentiment. It means attending to the great thinkers, sifting their ideas, and…
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The Beauty of Virtue
Virtue is more than a tool for a healthy citizenry or personal success. Edwards defines it as a kind of moral beauty — excellency in the qualities…
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Training the Soul
Xenophon’s point is simple: an untrained soul cannot perform the functions of the soul. Keeping ready to choose the right over the seductive is a…
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Polishing the Mind
Isolating our thinking from the great and good of the past flatters us into a false completeness and a narrow world. Reading McCosh, Epictetus…
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Perfect vs. Contingent Duties
Cicero distinguishes perfect duty (what is right in itself) from contingent duty (what admits a satisfactory situational reason). Perfect duties —…
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On Inner Peace
Utilitarian “good behavior” that only aims to stay out of trouble leaves the soul empty. We are moral beings in a sea of moral realities, and we feel…
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On True Contentment
True contentment is not a brake on ambition. It is peaceful resignation to Providence of all we cannot control, cutting off the parachutes of pride…
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The Middle Way of Pietas
Epictetus points to a middle way that avoids two traps: contentment without duty, which slides into apathy, and duty without contentment, which…
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Introducing the Pietas Papers
It’s been several years since I launched my first online project called Engaged Awareness . At the time, I was an Army civil affairs officer, and my…
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