The Therapy of Desire

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 of today.

• Meditations (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Nicomachean Ethics
• Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)
• Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault
• The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life's Hurdles
• On Violence: A Reader
• Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life
• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
• Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (The Gifford Lectures)