Academic

Book Announcement: The Therapy of Desire by Nussbaum in Paperback

By Lawrence Solum

Here is the announcement:

The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
Martha C. Nussbaum

To read the entire book description, please visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8894.html

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought today. This edition features a new introduction by Nussbaum, in which she revisits the themes of this now classic work.

"Even while she admires the seriousness and subtlety with which these philosophers analyze the passions, allows that there is an unresolveable conflict between the detachment and the intense engagement entailed by their philosophies. The sense that these philosophers still matter, that we can wrangle with them and learn from them, is invigorating."--Richard Jenkyns, New York Times Book Review

Paper | $29.95 / £20.95 | ISBN: 978-0-691-14131-2

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on August 06, 2009 (boomark / email).