Books like Memorabilia by Xenophon

A series of spiritual exercises for leading a meaningful life, 2,000 years old and still relevant today.

Reprinted with updated Further Reading

Plato’s collection of dialogues, featuring Socrates, interrogates virtue, love, politics, and the nature of knowledge—questions that have shaped Western thought for millennia.

This book is a revisionist account of the most famous trial and execution in Western civilization -- one with great resonance for modern society. In the spring of 399 BCE, the elderly philosopher Socrates stood trial in his native Athens. The court was packed, and after being found guilty by his peers, Socrates died by drinking a cup of poison hemlock, his execution a defining moment in ancient civilization. Yet time has transmuted the facts into a fable. Aware of these myths, Robin Waterfield has examined the actual Greek sources, presenting a new Socrates, not an atheist or guru of a weird sect, but a deeply moral thinker, whose convictions stood in stark relief to those of his former disciple, Alcibiades, the hawkish and self-serving military leader. Refusing to surrender his beliefs even in the face of death, Socrates, as Waterfield reveals, was determined to save a morally decayed country that was tearing itself apart. Why Socrates Died is then not only a powerful revisionist book, but a work whose insights translate clearly from ancient Athens to the present day. - Publisher.

This volume presents new translations of three dialogues Xenophon devoted to the life and thought of his teacher, Socrates. Each is accompanied by notes and an interpretive essay that will introduce new readers to Xenophon and foster further reflection in those familiar with his writing.

"How is this history of philosophy different from all others? 1. It's neighter very long (like Copleston's twelve-volumet tome, which is a clear and hepful reference work but pretty dull reading) nor very short (like many skimpy one-volume summaries) just long enough. 2. It's available in separate volumes but eventually in one complete work (after the four volumes - Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Contemporary - are produced in paperbound editions, a one-volume clothbound will be published). 3. It focuses on the "big ideas" that have influenced present people and present times. 4. It includes relevant biographical data, proportionate to its importance for each thinker. 5. It is not just history but philosophy. Its aim is not merely to record facts (of life or opinion) but to stimulate philosophizing, controversy, argument. 6. It aims above all at understanding, at what the old logic called the "first act of the mind" rather than the third: the thing computers and many "analytic philosophers" cannot understand. 7. It uses ordinary language and logic, not academic jargon or symbolic logic. 8. It is commonsensical (and therefore is sympathetic to commonsense philosophers like Aristotle). 9. It is "existential" in that it sees philosophy as something to be lived and tested"--

Study of Socrates through Xenophon’s observations, revealing his philosophy, daily life, and the religious, political, and moral climate of ancient Athens.