Out of all the Hellenistic philosophies which ones are the most helpful/insightful?
>>821523
meh, the golden age was dead by that point.
platonism and stoicism took their stranglehold.
Fallibilism
There are tremendous insights to be gleaned by people who managed to see things needle-like.
However, I'm on your boat of seeking out a sum of the most "helpful/insightful"
Honestly, I'd be good with just Marcus with healthy incursions into Heraclitus and doses of Epicurus (Plato and Aristotle are both maybe just a bit too deep for practicability)
If you're willing to adventure beyond the Greeks for a reconcilable group that'll set you up for life
Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
Lev Tolstoy, "Gospels in Brief"
Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Tractatus" & "Investigations"
The Tao Te Ching or Te Tao if that version floats you
The Collected Writings of Abraham Lincoln (read this in conjunction with the Tao)
Dashes of Schopenhauer, the Bhagavad Gita. A slim volume on Zen
>>821523
Cuckism
>>821523
the budha
The Anapanasati Sutta describes the natural progression of practise, namely:
1. When mindfulness (the non-attached craving hindrance free mind) is establised, the breath naturally comes to mind (stages 1 & 2), becomes increasingly clear (stage 3) and calms (stage 4).
2. When the breath calms to a degree that the mind becomes one-pointed, rapture & happiness will arise (stages 5 & 6).
3. When rapture & happiness (the mind-conditioners) calm (stage 8), the mind will have some underlying defilements, which are then observed (stage 9) & cleansed (stages 10 to 12).
4. When the mind becomes cleansed (stage 12), it will most clearly predominantly observe impermanence (stage 13) and experience Nibbana (stage 15) when craving ends (stage 16).
Therefore, the Anapanasati Sutta does not waste time or bother with watching painful feels & hindrances, since hindrances must be abandoned before commencement and since it is concerned with calming the mind & rapture.
>>821523
All of the big ones, as getting a firm grounding means that later philosophies are more intelligible.
>>821537
>Wittgenstein
>having anything to say about how to live the good life
Nice meme
Is there any post-Hellenistic philosophy that is useful?
Classical philosophy is much more useful than modern philosophy.
>>822415
Nietzsche.
Read The Antichrist.
>>822415
No, it's not.
Epistemology got good with the moderns.
Also, ethics free from mysticism is more of a modern thing, though there were prior instances.
>>823326
How is decades of wanking over the gettier problem 'good'?
>>821523
Not sure, this is a tricky question the answer to which will be based in part on your own preferences and tastes. But here's a quick summary of some stuff I find interesting, though I don't know it it's necessarily helpful.
Confining myself to Hellenistic Philosophy:
-Epicureanism: NOT to be taken as or confused with what we typically mean by hedonism, though Epicureanism IS technically a brand of hedonism. But there are some interesting ideas about (what's translated as) "static" and "dynamic" pleasures. The basic idea is that we ought to live a life centered on a kind of appreciation for what we have, and do what we can to avoid the "hedonic treadmill," which often involves stilling (rather than satisfying) desires or cravings which can lead to bad habits or future desires or cravings that will be hard to systematically satisfy. (Generally epic'ism isn't my cup of tea, but still some great stuff here).
Stoicism: Some aspects are in line with epicureanism. But the premium on a kind of self-control, and how self-control is conceived, is interesting.
Ancient Skepticism: Not like its modern counterpart (eg., Cartesian skepticism). This mode of skep. is an entire way of life. It's about achieving tranquilty through suspension of belief. I know mostly about Pyrrhonian skepticism, though there are other ancient skepticisms. What I say here is mostly about the Pyrrhonian variety. The idea is, rather than get hung up on whether this is the case or that is the case, you employ a series of skeptical maneuvers to suspend your belief. You keep inquiry going, and so (the idea is) achieve a kind of tranquillity. It's really weird and hard to understand sometimes, but part of the difficulty resides in HOW the ancients understood terms like "belief" and "knowledge," as well as how they understood perception (all of which, in the ancient context, differs widely from what we understand by these terms today).
>>823342
k brah
>>823326
>>823342
In fairness, the gettier cases aren't just modern, they're VERY modern. Typically, modern philosophy picks out philosophy (in the Western tradition) from AROUND the time of Descartes, so there's a huge history of really interesting epistemology before goddamn Gettier's two or three page "revolutionary" paper.
As for the remark about ethics free from mysticism being a modern thing... Not sure this is really right. I understand mysticism to mean something like: The view that, through certain sorts of practices, you can gain a special relation to (some very hard to define) Absolute Truth, or the reality of nature as it is independent (often "higher" reality--whatever that means) from human beings; we gain knowledge of this world through this special access. We gain special access through, for instance, ascetic self-deprivation. Moreover, mysticism usually holds that someone can't just convey the truth to me though language--I can't learn about the truth of things in the way someone can tell me truths about the Moon, or about my neighbor, or about human psychology, or neurology, or whatever. I have the EXPERIENCE the truths themselves through a mystical one-on-one confrontation with them.
IF that's what's meant by there's a long history in philosophy--before the moderns--of denying either the whole picture of mysticism, or particular parts of it. Aquinas (if I recall) believed there was a place for mysticism, but crucially tried to make room for non-mystical insights into the nature of the world.
Ibn Rushd warred with the mystical philosophy of his time.
And once you go back to the Ancient Philosophers, well, there's a great deal of skepticism about attaining priveleged access to some mystical truth. Most ancients I think would have baulked at the idea.
>>823400
I usually understand mysticism to refer to stuff like other planes of existence (Plato and the medieval scholars come to mind), hidden essences, something that can't be virtually reduced to physics, etc.
There were greeks and even medievals that broke away from the pattern like, say, the Epicureans.
Epictetus
STOICISM
>>824103
I'm not the one who claimed to read Nietzsche and the Antichrist, but I am an avid reader and researcher or N. I don't think he was a failure at life, though the end was pretty crap. That said, regardless of the quality of his own life--a quality affected (for better and worse) by physical ailments, in particular migraines--that might not mean he didn't have valuable things to say about how live well.
In fact, he was a huge scholar of Ancient Philosophy. One of the many problems he thought existed in modern thought and modern philosophy was that we've strayed from the Ancients. Abrahamic religious traditions, in particular Judeo-Christian ones, dominate our conception of the good life, but this conception is often constricting and psychologically repressive; here, N thought, the ancients have something to offer us.
That said, N wasn't the biggest fan of Hellenistic Philosophy.
>>823320
Nietzsche sort of saw himself as a continuation of Greek philosophy. I forget where but at one point he said he wasn't a German but a Greek.
>>825282
Yeah, pretty much.
>>824103
> There is nothing in modern philosophy that is nearly as useful as Stoicism or Epicureanism.
Looks like people doesn't actually study into philosophy beyond simple brand recognition.
>>821523
Neoplatonism, Socratic philosophy, and Christian mysticism.
>>821523
Stoicism
