Bøger i Ancient Wisdom for Modern Read serien

"Aristotle's essential guide to human flourishing-the Nicomachean Ethics-in a lively new abridged translationAristotle'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 carefully abridged version of the entire work in a highly readable and colloquial new translation by Susan Sauvâe Meyer that makes Aristotle's timeless insights about how to lead a good life more engaging and accessible than ever before.For Aristotle, flourishing means becoming a good person through practice, and having a life of the mind. To that end, he draws vivid portraits of virtuous and vicious characters, and offers sound practical advice about everything from eating and drinking to managing money, controlling anger, getting along with others, and telling jokes. He also distinguishes different kinds of wisdom that are essential to flourishing and offers an unusual perspective on how to appreciate our place in the universe and our relation to the divine.Omitting Aristotle's digressions and repetitions and overly technical passages, How to Flourish provides connecting commentary that allows readers to follow the continuous line of his thought; it also features the original Greek on facing pages. The result is an inviting and lively version of an essential work about how to flourish and lead a good and happy life"--

"An entertaining and enlightening collection of ancient writings about the philosophers who advocated simple living and rejected unthinking conformity. The Cynics were ancient Greek philosophers who stood athwart the flood of society's material excess, unexamined conventions, and even norms of politeness and thundered 'No!' Diogenes, the most famous Cynic, wasn't shy about literally extending his middle finger to the world, expressing mock surprise that 'most people go crazy over a finger.' When asked why he was called Diogenes the Dog, he replied 'because I fawn on those who give, I bark at those who don't, and I bite scoundrels.' How to Say No is a delightful collection of brief ancient writings about Cynicism that captures all the outrageousness, wit, and wisdom of its remarkable cast of characters-from Diogenes in the fourth century BCE to the column-stander Symeon Stylites in late antiquity. With their 'less is more' approach to life, the Cynics speak urgently to our world of climate change, economic uncertainty, and psychic malaise. Although the Cynics weren't writers, their memorable utterances and behavior were recorded by their admirers and detractors, and M. D. Usher offers fresh new translations of appealing selections from this body of writing-ranging from street sermons and repartee to biography and snapshots of Cynics in action.Complete with introductions to the volume and each selection as well as the original Greek and Latin on facing pages, this lively book demonstrates why the Cynics still retain their power to surprise us and make us laugh-and to make us think and question how we live"--

An entertaining and enlightening anthology of classical Greek and Roman writings on animals-and our vital relationships with themHow to Care about Animals is a fascinating menagerie of passages from classical literature about animals and the lives we share with them. Drawing on ancient writers from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and farmer M. D. Usher has gathered a healthy litter of selections that reveal some of the ways Greeks and Romans thought about everything from lions, bears, and wolves to birds, octopuses, and snails-and that might inspire us to rethink our own relationships with our fellow creatures. Presented in lively new translations, with the original texts on facing pages, these pieces are filled with surprises-anticipating but also offering new perspectives on many of our current feelings and ideas about animals.Here, Porphyry makes a compelling argument for vegetarianism and asserts that the just treatment of animals makes us better people; Pliny the Elder praises the virtuosity of songbirds and the virtuousness of elephants; Plutarch has one of Circe's pigs from the Odyssey make a serio-comic case for the dignity of the beasts of the field; Aristotle puts the study of animals on par with anthropology; we read timeless Aesopian fables, including "The Hen That Laid the Golden Egg" and "The Fox and the Grapes"; and there is much, much more.A Noah's Ark of a book, How to Care about Animals is guaranteed to charm and inspire anyone who loves animals.

"It doesn't take long after learning to speak for children to utter the cry, "That's not fair!" That familiar exclamation seems to emerge from a primal human sense: you know how you deserve to be treated, and you know that you have not been treated that way-you've been given a raw deal, you've not been done right by. In this volume for our Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, Robert Kaster explores how we treat others at the everyday, person-to-person level, taking as his source the ethical writings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Though Seneca does not quite address the demands of "fairness" as the central topic in any of his ethical writings, relevant principles and words of advice appear throughout them. Kaster has selected passages from "On Benefits" and "On Mercy," the twelve short essays on disparate themes collected in his "Dialogues," and the most influential of his works, the "Moral Epistles." He takes as his organizing principle one of the key premises of Stoic thought: you cannot do right by others unless you sort yourself out first, and sorting yourself out begins and ends with your mind. Doing right by others requires cultivating a great mind (magnus animus) and achieving magnanimity (magnanimitas), the quality that ensures (among other things) that one always give others what they deserve-in every way, from material goods to personal respect, and even punishment. He has organized the selections into five chapters, each giving a different view of doing the right thing when it comes to our relations with others: "Striving for Magnanimity"; "Being Calm, Thinking Clearly"; "Judging Yourself Fairly"; "Doing Right by Others"; and "Being Merciful.""--

"A vibrant new translation of Seneca's "On the Shortness of Life," a pointed reminder to make the most of a precious asset: our timeWho doesn't worry sometimes that smart phones, the internet, and TV are robbing us of time and preventing us from having a life? How can we make the most of our time on earth? In the first century AD, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger offered one of the most famous answers to that question in his essay, "On the Shortness of Life"-a work that has more to teach us today than ever before. In How to Have a Life, James Romm presents a vibrant new translation of Seneca's brilliant essay, plus two Senecan letters on the same theme, complete with the original Latin on facing pages and an inviting introduction.With devastating satiric wit, skillfully captured in this translation, Seneca lampoons the ways we squander our time and fail to realize how precious it is. We don't allow people to steal our money, yet we allow them to plunder our time, or else we give it away ourselves in useless, idle pursuits. Seneca also describes how we can make better use of our brief days and years. In the process, he argues, we can make our lives longer, or even everlasting, because to live a real life is to attain a kind of immortality.A counterweight to the time-sucking distractions of the modern world, How to Have a Life offers priceless wisdom about making our time-and our lives-count"--