The Life Worth Living in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Offers a fresh narrative of ancient ethics that does justice to neglected perspectives on the value of human life.

David Machek (Author)

9781009257862, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2024

271 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.5 cm, 0.41 kg

'[The book] is strongly to be commended for the freshness of the questions it poses and for the author's intelligent approach to answering them.' A. A. Long, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

The account of the best life for humans – i.e. a happy or flourishing life – and what it might consist of was the central theme of ancient ethics. But what does it take to have a life that, if not happy, is at least worth living, compared with being dead or never having come into life? This question was also much discussed in antiquity, and David Machek's book reconstructs, for the first time, philosophical engagements with the question from Socrates to Plotinus. Machek's comprehensive book explores ancient views on a life worth living against a background of the pessimistic outlook on the human condition which was adopted by the Greek poets, and also shows the continuities and contrasts between the ancient perspective and modern philosophical debates about biomedical ethics and the ethics of procreation. His rich study of this relatively neglected theme offers a fresh and compelling narrative of ancient ethics.

Introduction
1. Plato On Making Life Worth Living By Doing One's Job
2. Aristotle on the Natural Goodness of Life
3. Decoupling Happy Life from Life Worth Living in Stoicism
4. Threshold Nears the Target: Hellenistic Hedonists on the Life Worth Living
5. Peripatetics on Vicious Humans and Caged Animals
6. Plotinus on the Worth of Embodied Existence.

Subject Areas: Social & political philosophy [HPS], Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA]