Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' Guide to Modern Living

Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' Guide to Modern Living

Mark Vernon

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 1851687068

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Do you ever get the feeling that something went wrong? What with credit crunches, the war on terror, and unemployment, it is natural to hark back to less complicated times. In this witty and inspiring book, Mark Vernon does just that. However, he doesn’t just look back to the 1980s – try 400BC! Filled with timeless insight into life, relationships, work and partying, Plato's Podcasts takes a sideways glance at modern living and presents the would-be thoughts of Ancient Philosophers on various topics central to our 21st century existence. With a zany cast of characters – from the Gymnosophists (the naked philosophers) to Diogenes, who lived in a barrel – this is a humorous but enlightening manual to living well today (and two thousand years ago). Mark Vernon is a writer, journalist, broadcaster, academic, and former priest. Author of numerous books including Wellbeing and What Not to Say, he is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, and a frequent contributor for BBC radio and the BBC webportal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

you can say that of yourself, the opinion of others will not matter. Such is the advice he would offer us. CHAPTER 7 Pyrrho of Elis on suspending disbelief It might be said that we live in a world that above all else longs to know. When we take a train, we expect to know the departure and arrival times to the nearest minute. When we become ill, we expect the doctor to know the prognosis, and to tell it to us straight. When we save some money, we demand guarantees on the rates of return, and

again those to do with free will, and the bending of fingers that is anticipated deep within the brain. In fact, whilst the experiments are fascinating, they don’t demonstrate that free will is dead. For example, the subjects in the experiments always bend a finger. If they sat there and involuntarily bent a leg when they thought they might move their hand, that would be impressive. But they bend a finger, in compliance with the instructions they’d agreed to follow. Which is to say that in some

it was the largest of the temples in the Greek quarter of the city, and housed an offshoot of the Mouseion. It represented a bastion for the old world, and whilst it stood, a bulwark against the new. It had to be razed, and it was. Christian power had scored a triumph, for to level the temples of a civilisation is to destroy its soul. However, it was but one battle in a longer war, and the Mouseion itself survived, at least for a while. It had endured several calamities in the past, and had

explaining how the grey mush of the brain can give rise to the vivid experiences of the mind. The activity of neurons just seems entirely unlike the experience of being alive, for all that the two are deeply connected. So panpsychism postulates that matter and mind are actually two sides of the same coin, and that to some degree all matter can be said to be sentient, if not actually conscious. Our link with the rest of the universe is not just physical but mental. The Stoics associated the

one that it’s possible Socrates made his own, and can be stated simply. He took death to be what he hoped for, if he didn’t know for sure, namely the separation of the soul from the body. And the exercise that followed was to practise that separation as if it were true and see where the exploration led. How might that be done? In a word, meditation. It’s possible that such a practice was first championed by the presocratic philosopher Parmenides. It’s a controversial claim, but according to the

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