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Coping with the Human Condition - Living an Examined, a Disciplined and a Charitable Life book cover
Coping with the Human Condition - Living an Examined, a Disciplined and a Charitable Life
2011
First Published
4.33
Average Rating
323
Number of Pages
Living a successful temporal life and at the same time facing the reality of death tries the strongest among us. People approach thier lives from a variety of directions some of which are more adaptive than others. Those who live egocentric and disolute lives often later in life rue the day that they have been so foolish. If one looks to the great minds of the past such as Socrates (whose bust at the Lourve graces the cover of this book) and St. Paul and others, however, he will find guidelines that may make his life easier and perhaps even fulfilling - so that whether he looks forward to a life after death or only to "the dying of the light," he will have few grounds for regret.
Avg Rating
4.33
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Authors

John Keats
John Keats
Author · 92 books

Rich melodic works in classical imagery of British poet John Keats include " The Eve of Saint Agnes ," " Ode on a Grecian Urn ," and " To Autumn ," all in 1819. Work of the principal of the Romantic movement of England received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day during his short life. He nevertheless posthumously immensely influenced poets, such as Alfred Tennyson. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize poetry, including a series of odes, masterpieces of Keats among the most popular poems in English literature. Most celebrated letters of Keats expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability." Wikipedia page of the author

Socrates
Socrates
Author · 4 books

470 BC-399 BC Indefatigable search of Greek philosopher Socrates for ethical knowledge challenged conventional mores and led to his trial and execution on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth; although he wrote nothing, the dialogues of Plato, his greatest pupil, capture his method of question and answer. People consider this inscrutable individual enigma in his lifetime of the handful who forever changed conception of thought. They vigorously dispute most of our second-hand information, but his mythic death at the hands of the democracy nevertheless founded the academic discipline, and he influenced in every age. Because they widely consider his paradigmatic life more generally, the admiration and emulation, normally reserved for Jesus or Buddha, founders of religious sects, strangely encumbered Socrates, who, convicted on irreverence toward the gods, tried so hard to make other persons to think on their own. Many other persons found him so certainly impressive despite his strange appearance, personality, behavior, and views. People generally refer to the whole contested issue, the so thorny difficulty of distinguishing the historical person from his image in the authors of the texts and moreover scores of later interpreters, as the Socratic problem. Each age, each intellectual turn, produces an image of its own. No less true now that, “The ‘real’ Socrates we have not: what we have is a set of interpretations each of which represents a ‘theoretically possible’ Socrates,” as Cornelia de Vogel put. In fact, model of Gregory Vlastos, a new standard analytic paradigm for interpreting Socrates, held sway until the mid 1990s. Socrates, the figure, really fundamentally dominates any virtually any interpretation.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Author · 77 books

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him a authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets, including the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and poets in other languages such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy. He was also admired by Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and Bertrand Russell. Famous for his association with his contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, he was also married to novelist Mary Shelley.

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Coping with the Human Condition - Living an Examined, a Disciplined and a Charitable Life