How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

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A gigantic stone head from Old Smyrna, perhaps the kind of statue Pausanias saw in Erythrae and described as ‘absolutely Egyptian’. This is a readable and engaging book charts the rise of philosophy in the Ionian islands and coastal towns. It outlined the first emergence 2,500 years ago of the instinct that understanding was not simply to be learned from priests or elders, or experts, or by imagining a congeries of terrifying metaphysical monsters, but could be gathered by each of us applying the worrying and thinking mind to the conundrums of life.

The Greeks borrowed and fine tuned many current of thoughts that were brought to their shore by the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Lydians, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Indians. It examines how the development of harbour cities from 1200BC cultivated numerous great minds; it provides insight with facts and archeological discoveries whilst also exploring larger philosophical concerns from key thinkers of the era that are still relevant today.For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. It contains lots of accompanying images, maps and quotes that really enhance the reader’s understanding of the history, philosophy and geography discussed. On Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy, where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms. In How to Be, Nicolson continues his imaginative engagement with the ancient world, diving deeper into the lives of the pre-Socratic philosophers – some of whom you may know: Pythagoras, Heraclitus (“You can’t step into the same river twice”) and Zeno.

The chapter on Heraclitus was particularly interesting, but I also very much enjoyed the first chapter about The Odyssey.Maybe it wasn't supposed to, but the human mind responds better to stories than to disarticulated facts. The idea of the harbour mind is a brilliant one and convincingly joins together disparate thinkers with vastly differing approaches to the great questions of life. Often “How to Be” draws on this for its sources and some of its translations, expanding on the older work, thinking through some of its knottier ideas, enriching them with ground data and historical context, along with Nicolson’s own expansive thinking.

richer and more unusual than [the self-help genre], an exploration of the origins of Western subjectivity.They were literate, adopting and developing the alphabet that in the eighth century the Greeks would borrow and adapt from them in their turn, but the Phoenicians left nearly no record of themselves: no poetry, no epic tales, no literature, no history, no drama, no philosophy. It takes your breath away’ Laura Beatty, bestselling author of Lost Property --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Dip Into NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Collectively these people were known to the Greeks as the Phoenicians, meaning the ‘red ones’, perhaps because of the purple-dyed cloth they made and wore. I constantly needed to look up the definition of words as I was reading, which made this reading experience a bit cumbersome.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Written in a flowing and eminently readable style, we are taken on a beguiling and informative journey that looks back at the very foundations of Western philosophy in the context in which it was birthed; despite having read many similar tombs this is the only one that has approached the topic in this manner and from such an original angle. Here is a superb one from the Getty, covering the rise of the first cities around 3500 BC, through the em. He is an English aristocrat, though he does not use his title — Heraclitus would approve — and is the grandson of Virginia Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West (and Sir Harold Nicolson).To imagine large geopolitical change as human experience is difficult, partly because it occurs on a far from personal scale and over time spans that stretch beyond the individual life.