Building Your Library

The Sunday Age

Sunday December 18, 2005

SIMON CATERSON

The Last Days of Socrates

By Plato

Like Jesus, Socrates is one of the great heroic figures in the Western tradition, but he left nothing written in his own hand. His most famous pupil recounts his love of reason and argument and the courage with which the master faced his death sentence.

The Republic

By Plato

Where Socrates criticised the Athens of his time, Plato attempted to construct a new society based on order and justice. The famous myth of the cave introduces the doctrine that only those with a superior understanding are fit to rule, hence the term "philosopher king".

The Art and Thought of Heraclitus

We know next to nothing about him and have only fragments of his thought, many of which are obscure as they are profound. "Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe," he tells us.

Ethics

By Aristotle

Tutor to the young Alexander the Great, Aristotle's work ranges freely over areas of knowledge and thought that these are days narrowly specialised. "Wisdom produces happiness, not as medical science produces health, but as healthiness is the cause of health."

Essential Epicurus

Though now associated with a life devoted to sensuality, Epicurus in fact advocated living well but not hedonistically. He was a pre-Darwinian advocate of the idea of the survival of the fittest, which makes him very much a thinker of our time.