Can the ancient Greeks really offer us 'life lessons' today? | The Spectator - 0 views
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lessons life philosophers greek pre-Socratics history
shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 23
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How To Be, which aims to separate out the strands of thought that originated in Greece between 650 and 450 BC.
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the early breakthroughs occurred in the islands on the far side of the Aegean over by Turkey (Homer, Heraclitus), and later migrated to southern Italy and Sicily (Pythagoras, Empedocles).
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His organising thesis is that western thought arose from a ‘harbour mind’, one that was attuned to the meeting of land and water, open to the flux of the sea while aware of the fixedness of land
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Bertrand Russell’s observation that philosophy was born out of the ‘conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science’.
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the Odyssey is crammed with life lessons. That could be a book in itself. Each adventure yields a moral, from the dangers of drugs (the Lotus Eaters) to the superiority of brains over brawn (the Cyclops) to the nature and essential value of love (the ending)
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How to Be, then, is best taken not as the self-help book its title implies but as a poetic tour of philosophical thought which persuades us that, on the contrary, the pre-Socratics are the last people to look to for life advice. As Socrates himself observed wryly about Thales’s pratfall: ‘Philosophers always look like idiots.’