Book Review - Examined Lives - By James Miller - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Miller has now had the superb idea of taking Diogenes Laertius as a model, while simultaneously using this model to test whether such an approach can still offer us anything of value. He covers 12 philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with Laertius), Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche. In each case, he explores the life selectively, looking for “crux” points and investigating how ideas of the philosophical life have changed.
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Miller concludes that his 12 philosophical lives offer a moral that is “neither simple nor uniformly edifying.” It amounts mainly to the idea that philosophy can offer little or no consolation, and that the examined life is, if anything, “harder and less potentially rewarding” for us than it was for Socrates.