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The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

classics.mit.edu

31–40 of 103 posts

Re: The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

#31

I highly recommend William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life, then reading Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, et al. As an aside: I listened to Irvine on audiobook immediately after listening to Sherry Turkle's Alone Together. It was like reading about a disease and then the treatment. Recommend, would do again.

I’d recommend skipping Irvine’s book and just going straight to the sources. I didn’t feel like he added much, and thought his book was poorly structured and overly didactic; too close to the style of the popular self-help book for my taste. I also felt like he projected many of his own opinions/conclusions back on the authors he was discussing.

Maybe my impression is biased by the uninspiring quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level though: I’m pretty sensitive to bland fuzzy writing.

Re: The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

#33
Just checked wikipedia [1], and found this critique:

> D.A. Rees calls the Meditations "unendingly moving and inspiring", but does not offer them up as works of original philosophy. Bertrand Russell found them contradictory and inconsistent, evidence of a "tired age" where "even real goods lose their savour". Using Marcus as an example of greater Stoic philosophy, he found their ethical philosophy to contain an element of "sour grapes". "We can't be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesn't matter being unhappy".

Can anybody agree/disagree/comment?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations

Re: The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

#34

I highly recommend William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life, then reading Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, et al. As an aside: I listened to Irvine on audiobook immediately after listening to Sherry Turkle's Alone Together. It was like reading about a disease and then the treatment. Recommend, would do again.

Also, the meditations are available on LibreVox.

Link: https://librivox.org/the-meditations-of-marcus-aurelius/

Re: The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

#35
post #32

What kind of insight can I expect from reading this?

Cognitive Behavior Therapy is modelled after stoic principles. It's a mental model to survive hardship and stay on course no matter what is happening in your life.

Another insight if you want to call it so is that the texts are 2000 years old and they still apply to daily life now.

Re: The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

#36

I highly recommend William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life, then reading Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, et al. As an aside: I listened to Irvine on audiobook immediately after listening to Sherry Turkle's Alone Together. It was like reading about a disease and then the treatment. Recommend, would do again.

I’d recommend skipping Irvine’s book and just going straight to the sources. I didn’t feel like he added much, and thought his book was poorly structured and overly didactic; too close to the style of the popular self-help book for my taste. I also felt like he projected many of his own opinions/conclusions back on the authors he was discussing. Maybe my impression is biased by the uninspiring quality of his prose on…

[deleted]

Re: The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

#38
post #7

This has become my preferred translation. It's a great modern translation and uses very approachable language. To me it reads much more like a journal than the other available translations. http://amzn.to/1xy6LYZ

Agreed. I've read a couple and this is my favorite translation.

Re: The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

#40
post #7

This has become my preferred translation. It's a great modern translation and uses very approachable language. To me it reads much more like a journal than the other available translations. http://amzn.to/1xy6LYZ

Seems like the Kindle link on that page is to a different version, this looks to me like the correct Kindle version: http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-New-Translation-Modern-Lib...
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