Here are 100 books that The Courage of Truth fans have personally recommended if you like
The Courage of Truth.
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While I am Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina and the author of ten books, I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City. My parents were from rural Missouri. I never met a professor, a writer, or an artist growing up. I never seriously considered going to college. But I loved to read. When I went to college and discovered you could major in literature and ancient languages, my life changed. I am now at work on a book entitled Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero: Rhetoric and Philosophy Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which reflects on what Cicero can teach us about living in a post-truth age.
This is one of the most important books I have ever read. It changed the way I think about Socrates, Plato, Foucault, and Nietzsche. It gave me a deep appreciation of the philosophical and ethical importance of irony as a way of being in the world. It convinced me to spend all my free time for several months reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and it made me see the relationship between ancient philosophy and modern life in a fundamentally new way. It is simply one of the most beautifully written and suggestive books of modern philosophy published in English in the last fifty years.
For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an 'art of living'. This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
While I am Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina and the author of ten books, I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City. My parents were from rural Missouri. I never met a professor, a writer, or an artist growing up. I never seriously considered going to college. But I loved to read. When I went to college and discovered you could major in literature and ancient languages, my life changed. I am now at work on a book entitled Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero: Rhetoric and Philosophy Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which reflects on what Cicero can teach us about living in a post-truth age.
The Apologyis where Western philosophy begins. Socrates is on trial for his life. The charge is impiety and corrupting the youth. His real crime, however, was teaching the young men of Athens to waylay their elders with difficult and impertinent questions. His message to these young men? Know yourself, know the limits of your knowledge, and do not care more for your possessions than you do for your soul and excellence. For Socrates’ unyielding commitment to live in accord with these principles, he gave his life. This is his defense speech.
The Apology of Socrates, by Plato, is the dialogue that presents the speech of legal self-defence, which Socrates presented at his trial for impiety and corruption, in 399 BC.
★ Specifically: The Apology of Socrates is a defence against the charges of “corrupting the youth” and “not believing in the same gods as the city, but in other gods which are novel” to Athens.
★ The Apology of Socrates is the dialogue that depicts the trial, written by Plato who details the final days of the philosopher great Socrates.
★ This book has been carefully adapted into modern English to…
While I am Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina and the author of ten books, I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City. My parents were from rural Missouri. I never met a professor, a writer, or an artist growing up. I never seriously considered going to college. But I loved to read. When I went to college and discovered you could major in literature and ancient languages, my life changed. I am now at work on a book entitled Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero: Rhetoric and Philosophy Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which reflects on what Cicero can teach us about living in a post-truth age.
Tibullus is the great unsung hero of Roman poetry. His subtle and gently ironic poems are dedicated to his mistresses Delia and Nemesis, and to his pederastic beloved Marathus. They posit a lost Golden Age, when men lived in primal harmony, the earth spontaneously yielded up its bounty, and love was had al fresco without possessiveness. His poems reflect the kind of ironic pseudo-naiveté that can only be produced by the most sophisticated of urban intellects. Dennis and Putnam not only capture these richly textured poems about a simple life that never was and never could be, but they also reproduce the movement of Tibullus’s poetic line and meter. This is a poetry of suave and knowing elegance.
Tibullus is considered one of the finest exponents of Latin lyric in the golden age of Rome, during the Emperor Augustus' reign, and his poetry retains its enduring beauty and appeal. Together these works provide an important document for anyone who seeks to understand Roman culture and sexuality and the origins of Western poetry. The new translation by Rodney Dennis and Michael Putnam conveys to students the elegance and wit of the original poems. This title is ideal for courses on classical literature, classical civilization, Roman history, comparative literature, and the classical tradition and reception. The Latin verses will be…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
While I am Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina and the author of ten books, I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City. My parents were from rural Missouri. I never met a professor, a writer, or an artist growing up. I never seriously considered going to college. But I loved to read. When I went to college and discovered you could major in literature and ancient languages, my life changed. I am now at work on a book entitled Truth and Enjoyment in Cicero: Rhetoric and Philosophy Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which reflects on what Cicero can teach us about living in a post-truth age.
Dramatically placed by Cicero as a follow-up to DeRepublica, Laelius in the DeAmicitia is asked to reflect on his friendship with the recently deceased Scipio. Laelius speaks of his loss but also of the extraordinary gift that is friendship as a continuing desire for a form of fulfillment that only the other can provide. That ideal other, who is also a reflection of the self, becomes exalted as a sublime object who embodies a confluence of the personal and the political within the dimension of friendship as enjoyment. The art of friendship is, in fact, the art of living.
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
I am fascinated by humanity’s search for meaning. That is what I am exploring as I read philosophy and as I write my biographies of extraordinary individuals. Sue Prideaux has written award-winning books on Edvard Munch and his painting The Scream, the playwright August Strindberg, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. She acted as consultant to Sotheby’s when they sold The Scream for a record-breaking $120 million.
Nietzsche said; “Today’s philosophers enjoy the divine principle of incomprehensibility.” This clearly written book takes the opposite tack. If you’re terrified of philosophy, this is the book for you. A great book to get the kids interested in the subject.
For readers of E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World, an equally irresistible volume that brings history's greatest philosophers to life
"A primer in human existence: philosophy has rarely seemed so lucid, so important, so worth doing and so easy to enter into. . . . A wonderful introduction for anyone who's ever felt curious about almost anything."-Sarah Bakewell, author of How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who…
I’m a philosopher who’s taught mostly undergraduates for over thirty years at small liberal arts colleges in the US, and I’ve held research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and Williams College. I’ve co-authored three “toolkit” books – The Philosopher’s Toolkit, The Ethics Toolkit, and The Critical Thinking Toolkit. My more scholarly work, however, has focused on skepticism, for example in Hume’s Scepticism. I also like to write about pop culture, especially for collections like my Big Lebowski and Philosophy. Fundamentally, though, I’m just a lover of dialectic and an explorer in the world of ideas. Nothing, for me, is more enjoyable.
This book really captures what it’s like to do philosophy in an informed but informal way. Philosophy as Socrates practiced it, and as it often is at its best, is a dialogue among several interlocutors. Different people share their different views on a topic, compare them, scrutinize and criticize them, and hopefully improve them. Phillips started a movement of Socratic cafés where people got together to do just that. The topics recorded here analyze love in its various forms (erotic, familial, friendly, hospitable, spiritual, and philosophical). Love is, in fact, basic to philosophy, which, as the word philosophia implies, is the love of wisdom. Read this in conjunction with Plato’s dialogues about Socrates’ trial and death: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.
Christopher Phillips goes to the heart of philosophy and Socratic discourse to discover what we're all looking for: the kind of love that makes life worthwhile. That is, love not defined only as eros, or erotic love, but in all its classical varieties. Love of neighbor, love of country, love of God, love of life, and love of wisdom-each is clarified and invigorated in Phillips's Socratic dialogues with people from all walks of life and from all over the world.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
Philosophy was once the crown jewel of human knowledge, addressing all aspects of the natural world and human existence, and a font of moral guidance and inspiration. Today it is a marginal academic exercise, largely ingrown, inscrutable to even the well educated, and mostly ignored by the wider public. My quest has been to help restore the relevance and importance of philosophy in today’s world.
Hadot’s book was a rare confirmation for me of an alternate approach to ancient philosophy. My earlier work on ancient sceptics had led me to appreciate the centrality of personal therapy aimed towards peace of mind. Hadot persuasively demonstrates that this was, in fact, the aim of virtually all ancient Greek philosophy.
Modern philosophers have presumed that the ancients, like themselves, are engaged in an objective search for truth. Hadot shows that philosophers from Plato and Aristotle, Epicureans and Stoics, to Plotinus and St. Augustine, focused not on truth but on easing pain and suffering through a variety of therapeutic strategies, including self-control through meditative practices.
The result is an entirely new and revolutionary understanding of ancient philosophy.
This book presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of the different conceptions of philosophy that have accompanied the trajectory and fate of the theory and practice of spiritual exercises. Hadota s book demonstrates the extent to which philosophy has been, and still is, above all else a way of seeing and of being in the world.
In Plato’s Sophist, the main speaker (not Socrates in this case!) mocks those he calls “late-learners," I fall decidedly into that category. When I first read the works of Plato, I was lured into a lifelong attempt to understand and explain the figure of Socrates as he appears in Plato’s dialogues. Lately I have been reading materials by ancient Socratic sources other than Plato and have been wrestling with the uneasy recognition that this “father of Western philosophy” was not seen in the same way even by those who knew him personally. Who was Socrates??? Once upon a time, I thought I knew…
Collected in this one book are very reliable and readable translations of a prudent selection of the fragments of Socratic authors other than Plato and Xenophon, and these are compared very intelligently to what may be found on similar topics in Plato and Xenophon.
Reading these gave me, as Platonically fixated as I am, a feeling of whiplash. Will the real Socrates please stand up?
In addition to works by Plato and Xenophon, we know of dozens of treatises and dialogues written by followers of Socrates that are now lost. The surviving evidence for these writings constitutes an invaluable resource for our understanding of Socrates and his philosophical legacy. The Circle of Socrates presents new--sometimes the first--English translations of a representative selection of this evidence, set alongside extracts from Plato and Xenophon. The texts are arranged according to theme, with concise introductions that provide an overview of the topics and the main lines of thought within them.
Philosophy is defined as “the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.” Put another way, it is not so much the study of things and phenomena, but the derivative question below the veneer of what things are. I am interested in everything, how everything works, but also why it, and all of nature, including the mind and eyelashes, exist in the first place. I can remember back to childhood always thinking like this. This involves grasping for knowledge of both the details and global contexts of everything, whether it’s biology, chemistry, religion, neuroscience, horticulture, violence, goodness, hockey, or even what Plato was trying to say.
After 2,400 years, Plato finally won the battle against Socrates, Aristotle, Avicenna, Rousseau, Locke, Freud, French and Neo-Liberalism, and most parents of two-year-olds. According to 21st-century neuroscientists, as Plato provided in the Allegory of the Cave, the prescient idea is that we are not born as blank slates, but rather have the basic knowledge of beauty, good and evil baked into our prenatal brain (genetically preformed circuits!)
Collected here in two volumes are the complete works of Plato, in the classic translation by Benjamin Jowett. One of the most influential thinkers of Ancient Greece or any other era, Plato formed the basis of Western philosophy. Mostly written in the form of dialogues with his teacher Socrates as the protagonist, his works address themes as varied as metaphysics, psychology, pedagogy, politics, and ethics. Despite the weighty subject matter, Plato's writing remains accessible to the general reader, and infused with wit and humor. Why is Plato worth reading today? His dialogues are vitally concerned with how we should live.…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
Epictetus has rung my bell ever since I first encountered him forty years ago as a young graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. I was, and am, consistently moved by his frank, emphatic, almost confrontational style of teaching. Whenever I read his Discourses, it lifts my spirits, inspires me, and makes me feel wiser—even stronger. So, I naturally want to read the insights other authors have about his earnest, gripping brand of Stoicism. The wisdom of Epictetus’ teachings never fades. He equips his readers with the philosophical tools for crafting a life of freedom, resilience, and joy. Who doesn’t want that?
What I loved about this book is its lucid, ambitious, and exceptionally insightful treatment of Epictetus as a Socratic moral teacher.
I admired how Long brought Epictetus to life not only as a philosopher but also as a pedagogue ardently committed to human flourishing. His analysis of Epictetus’s use of the Socratic method, his compelling interpretation of prohairesis as “volition,” and his explanation of Epictetus’s theology as both intimate and distinctly Stoic were masterful.
I especially appreciated how Long captured Epictetus’s tone, rhetorical range, and practical urgency. His emphasis on Epictetus’s originality—particularly in appropriating Socratic methods—was spot on, making the book an engaging and invaluable contribution to understanding Epictetus.
The philosophy of Epictetus, a freed slave in the Roman Empire, has been profoundly influential on Western thought: it offers not only stimulating ideas but practical guidance in living one's life. A. A. Long, a leading scholar of later ancient philosophy, gives the definitive presentation of the thought of Epictetus for a broad readership. Long's fresh and vivid translations of a selection of the best of Epictetus' discourses show that his ideas are as valuable and striking today as they were amost two thousand years ago. The translations are organized thematically within the framework of an authoritative introduction and commentary,…
