Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus
Language: English
Pages: 456
ISBN: 069115970X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is a major reinterpretation of ancient philosophy that recovers the long Greek and Roman tradition of philosophy as a complete way of life--and not simply an intellectual discipline. Distinguished philosopher John Cooper traces how, for many ancient thinkers, philosophy was not just to be studied or even used to solve particular practical problems. Rather, philosophy--not just ethics but even logic and physical theory--was literally to be lived. Yet there was great disagreement about how to live philosophically: philosophy was not one but many, mutually opposed, ways of life. Examining this tradition from its establishment by Socrates in the fifth century BCE through Plotinus in the third century CE and the eclipse of pagan philosophy by Christianity, Pursuits of Wisdom examines six central philosophies of living--Socratic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, and the Platonist life of late antiquity.
The book describes the shared assumptions that allowed these thinkers to conceive of their philosophies as ways of life, as well as the distinctive ideas that led them to widely different conclusions about the best human life. Clearing up many common misperceptions and simplifications, Cooper explains in detail the Socratic devotion to philosophical discussion about human nature, human life, and human good; the Aristotelian focus on the true place of humans within the total system of the natural world; the Stoic commitment to dutifully accepting Zeus's plans; the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure through tranquil activities that exercise perception, thought, and feeling; the Skeptical eschewal of all critical reasoning in forming their beliefs; and, finally, the late Platonist emphasis on spiritual concerns and the eternal realm of Being.
Pursuits of Wisdom is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding what the great philosophers of antiquity thought was the true purpose of philosophy--and of life.
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This assumption that the ancient philosophers are able to make plausible, and to work out, in their different theoretical constructions, their conceptions of philosophy as a way of life. For they all share a second fundamental view. They think that philosophy, in being the pursuit of wisdom and ultimate truth, is the intellectual accomplishment (in ancient terms the “art” or the form of knowledge)—the only one—whereby reason is made perfect.17 As such, it is the final and sole authority as to.
Charging Socrates with even to be able not to contradict himself when explaining how the charge applies to Socrates. And though these failures do not prove that Socrates is innocent of the charges, they do show that Meletus really had no business bringing them against him, a fellow citizen entitled, as such, to special consideration. (Alas, this is not how the 501 Athenian male citizens making up the jury react to Socrates’s “demonstration” of Meletus’s inadequacies: at any rate, they found him.
In Aristotle’s mind as he wrote his chapters on courage. Philosophy as Two Ways of Life name). Commentators sometimes refer to these, perhaps disparagingly, as “minor social virtues,” but Aristotle himself gives no indication that he regards them as minor at all, not even comparatively. For Aristotle, “morality” is by no means limited to justice or abuse of power and status, or other violations of civic or other rights and duties, but extends equally right through all aspects and circumstances.
Soul and with all the compound and complex material bodies that this soul itself passes through.23 Reason or Zeus in fact, on Stoic theory, contacts all parts of the world however small (indeed at what we would call infinitesimal levels). By that contact the divine mind is able to cause all the states and conditions of matter itself, and all the states and conditions of all the different kinds of material things, as well as all the changes over time, that constitute the world and its history over.
Badly one feels, in loyalty to the one who has died. But, on their analysis of our moral psychology, such states of the soul—ones that do motivate us to action expressing them, whether we then go on to act on them, or not—can derive from, and belong to, only our power of reason. They cannot belong to some part of our souls separate from reason, since there are none that do contain anything that motivates our actions (to any degree or in any way). Hence, in declaring all emotional states bad, they.