The Therapy of Desire

by Nussbaum, Martha C.

• ISBN13: 9780691000527
• ISBN10: 0691000522
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-02-16
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction	p. 3
Therapeutic Arguments	p. 13
Medical Dialectic: Aristotle on Theory and Practice	p. 48
Aristotle on Emotions and Ethical Health	p. 78
Epicurean Surgery: Argument and Empty Desire	p. 102
Beyond Obsession and Disgust: Lucretius on the Therapy of Love	p. 140
Mortal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature	p. 192
"By Words, Not Arms": Lucretius on Anger and Aggression	p. 239
Skeptic Purgatives: Disturbance and the Life without Belief	p. 280
Stoic Tonics: Philosophy and the Self-Government of the Soul	p. 316
The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions	p. 359
Seneca on Anger in Public Life	p. 402
Serpents in the Soul: A Reading of Seneca's Medea	p. 439
The Therapy of Desire	p. 484
List of Philosophers and Schools	p. 511
Bibliography	p. 517
Index Locorum	p. 531
General Index	p. 550
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