Roman Philosophy

La pensée antique est au fondement de l'histoire des idées et de la philosophie occidentale. Fondamentalement pratique et axée sur le quotidien, elle est marquée par le stoïcisme et la recherche de la sagesse sous toutes ses formes. Découvrez-en toute la profondeur en 400 citations soigneusement choisies pour présenter sous forme condensée les enseignements majeurs des figures incontournables de la Grèce antique.

Imagine you’ve eaten some hallucinogenic mushrooms—and things aren’t going well. You’re disoriented, panicking. But you can call someone. Who do you call? For Vishal, the answer was his philosopher friend William. He has a PhD in philosophy and can deliver one hell of a talk-down to someone in an existential crisis. He helped Vishal through his bad trip by telling him about Aristotle. That conversation inspired Ask Aristotle, a refreshingly un-schoolish introduction to one of history’s most legendary thinkers.

"Nu ne temem niciodată de vag, ci doar de precis. Îmi imaginez un omuleț care îmbracă o togă și care îmi rostește sentința. Totul aici e precis: judecătorul, vina, sentința. Răspunderea mea este de asemenea precisă, dar e mică, iar consecințele nu sunt ultime. Și totuși teama mea e teribilă și fac tot ce pot pentru a nu ajunge în fața omulețului în togă. Stăm față în față cu viața noastră sau cel care ne-a făcut concesia libertății. Totul aici e vag: judecătorul, vina, sentința."

Aristotle was the first philosopher to write ethical treatises. His best-known work in this field, The Nicomachean Ethics, consists of 10 books addressing the question of how the individual should best live. For Aristotle, ethics seeks to determine what makes a virtuous character possible, which is essential for a state of well-being. He describes a sequence of necessary steps to achieve this, such as righteous actions that promote the development of the right habits. He examines the moral virtues and their corresponding vices, like courage versus fear.

"L'Éthique à Nicomaque" d'Aristote est composée de neuf livres qui traitent des moyens d'atteindre le bonheur en développant la vertu. Les deux derniers livres sont consacrés à définir l'amitié, telle qu'elle existe et telle qu'elle doit être vécue par l'homme vertueux. La méthode aristotélicienne permet de distinguer les différentes causes et les différentes manifestations de l'amitié, nécessaire à l'homme et qui lui révèle son appartenance à la communauté. Le véritable ami est celui qui aime l'autre pour lui, et non en vue de ce qu'il peut lui apporter.

In 63 BC, frustrated by his failure to be elected leader of the Roman Republic, the aristocrat Catiline tried to topple its elected government. Backed by corrupt elites and poor, alienated Romans, he fled Rome while his associates plotted to burn the city and murder its leading politicians. The attempted coup culminated with the unmasking of the conspirators in the Senate. In How to Stop a Conspiracy, Josiah Osgood presents a brisk, modern new translation of the definitive account of these events, Sallust's The War with Catiline.

Best selling history writer Thomas Cahill continues his series on the roots of Western civilization with this volume about the contributions of ancient Greece to the development of contemporary culture. Tracing the origin of Greek culture in the migrations of armed Indo-European horsemen into Attica and the Peloponnesian peninsula, he follows their progress into the creation of the Greek city-states, the refinement of their machinery of war, and the flowering of intellectual and artistic culture.

The idea of sexual fluidity may seem new, but it is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, who wrote about queer experiences with remarkable frankness, wit, and insight. How to Be Queer is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations.

The Habsburg family ruled central Europe since the early medieval times to World War I, but they still exist as one of the most prestigious Austrian families. To keep themselves in such high positions, the Habsburgs had to develop unique strategies to fight their political enemies. They wanted to rule the world and saw themselves as the only dynasty worthy of such divine right. To keep the family pure, they often married within their family, which resulted in a very weak genetic pool and many mental and physical problems.

Take a journey through the ancient history of the Jewish people, a proud and stubborn people who desired to retain their freedom and uniqueness. They fought for this ideal for centuries with various success, but then came the mighty Roman Empire. At first, the Romans were their allies, but they eventually conquered the Jewish state into their vast realm.

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by peace and freedom from fear, the absence of pain, and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil; death is the end of both body and soul and should therefore not be feared; the gods neither reward nor punish humans; the universe is infinite and eternal; and events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms.

On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation's founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders' thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works—among them the Iliad, Plutarch's Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero.

Texte apocryphe probablement, ce "Manuel d'Epictète" est un discours sur les vertus du Philosophe en des termes très simples, qui s'appliquent en fait à tout humain. Sans doute un des premiers textes de développement personnel de l'Histoire, l'auteur y explicite les idées et les habitudes qu'une personne qui veut trouver la vérité doit rechercher en lui et en dehors, en véritable Stoïcien. Au XXème siècle encore, il influence fortement les philosophes par ses textes, comme par exemple Alain.

Written nearly two thousand years ago, Emperor Marcus Aurelius‘s Meditations remains a relevant and profound philosophical exploration of what it means to live a meaningful life.

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Christopher Taylor explores the life of Socrates and his philosophical activity, before looking to the responses his philosophical doctrines have evoked in the centuries since his betrayal and execution at fellow Athenian hands.

La pensée stoïcienne est avant tout une médecine de l'âme. Toute entière tendue vers l'application pratique, c'est un véritable manuel de vie, qui nous donne les clefs pour nous détacher de la souffrance quotidienne et nous approcher de la sagesse d'une vie vertueuse. Les écrits stoïques sont parvenus jusqu'à nous sous forme de fragments, qui contiennent chacun l'essence des enseignements dont nous avons besoin aujourd'hui pour rentrer dans la pensée de ses grands auteurs.

This book intends to reintroduce pleasure as an innate guide to living a healthy and happy life—a simple yet powerful assertion based on empirical data, which stands up to the strictest scrutiny.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the greatest guides to human flourishing ever written, but its length and style have left many readers languishing. How to Flourish is a colloquial new translation by Susan Sauve Meyer that makes Aristotle's timeless insights about how to lead a good life more engaging and accessible than ever before.

Throughout the Roman Empire cities held public speeches and lectures, had libraries, and teachers and professors in the sciences and the humanities, some subsidized by the state. There even existed something equivalent to universities, and medical and engineering schools. What were they like? What did they teach? Who got to attend them? In the first treatment of this subject ever published, Dr. Richard Carrier answers all these questions and more.

Considered by many to be the most important philosopher ever, Plato was born into a well-to-do family in wartime Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE. He finally decided to go into politics, but became disillusioned, especially after the Athenians condemned his teacher, Socrates, to death. He began teaching in his twenties and later founded the Academy, the world's first higher-educational research and teaching establishment. Eventually, he returned to practical politics and spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to create a constitution for Syracuse in Sicily.