School of Life - Western Philosophy Card Set

A card set featuring 20 of the greatest ideas from Western Philosophy.

Philosophy is a discipline committed to helping us live wiser and less sorrowful lives. This card set draws together twenty of the greatest ideas found in Western philosophy, spanning the history of thought from Socrates to Jean-Paul Sartre. Each is displayed on a beautifully illustrated card. We are reminded of the wit, humanity, and relevance of a number of philosophes including Nietzsche and Heidegger, Kant and Camus, Machiavelli and Kierkegaard. Essential thoughts about love, work, anxiety, self-knowledge, and happiness are rescued, highlighted and inspiringly presented here so they can work their consoling effect where it is more needed: in our daily lives.

Example Content:

• Eudaimonia: 'This is an Ancient Greek word, normally translated as 'fulfillment', particularly emphasized by the philosopher Aristotle. It deserves wider currency because it corrects the shortfalls in one of the most central terms in our contemporary idiom: happiness. The Ancient Greeks resolutely did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy; they proposed that it was to be fulfilled. It is eminently possible to be fulfilled and, at the same time, under pressure, suffering physically or mentally, overburdened and in a tetchy mood. [...] Henceforth, we shouldn't try to be happy; we should accept the greater realism, ambition, and patience that accompanies the quest for eudaimonia.'
  
  
• Eros and Philia: 'Very early on, Greek philosophy twigged that love is not really one thing but a cluster of very different emotions and attitudes that we should carefully distinguish between. Having an array of words for love can spare us the perils of a simple-minded sense that we are no longer 'in love' when we've merely moved onto a different, but still authentically real, phase of love.'
  
  
• The Sublime: 'The concept of the sublime refers to an experience of vastness (of space, age, time) beyond calculation or comprehension - a sense of awe that we might feel before an ocean, a glacier, the Earth from a plane, or a starry sky. [...] The Sublime grants us a perspective from which our own concerns seem mercifully irrelevant.'