Details
Synopsis
Comte-Sponville, a professor at the Sorbonne, muses on an ensemble of 18 virtues, informed by Aristotle, Spinoza, Simone Weil, as well as contemporary European thinkers. He writes to show readers how virtues have fared since the Classical age and how they are relevant to life in a modern world.
| Size | | Length: | 352 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 23.2 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "If a virtue can be taught, as I believe it can be, it is not through books so much as by example."
Industry Reviews
"If Comte-Sponville is the most widely read philosopher today, it is because his readers find in his writings the tools they need to think more fully and reasonably about their own lives."
Publisher's Catalog - Tzvetan Todorov
"An effervescent primer of the morally examined life."
Kirkus Reviews (07/01/2001)
"The book may be steeped in the work of the great moral writers...but it is by no means an academic tome. In addition to its directness and clarity, well conveyed by Catherine Temerson's translation, it is pretty much aimed at moral improvement rather than textual interpretation, the trademark obscurantism of second-rate academe or the meta-ethical questions...that have given much of postwar moral philosophy in English-speaking countries its constipated pallor."
New York Times Book Review (10/14/2001)
"[T]he book is a magnificent achievement, a volume full of understanding and imagination from which no reader can fail to profit. It is not at all a work of haute vulgarisation, but a systematic theory of the virtues that can stand comparison with the central books of the NICOMACHEAN ETHICS."
New Republic - Charles Larmore (10/22/2001)
"[D]espite A SHORT TREATISE's difficulty (not, incidentally, the same thing as obscurantism), the book knocks you sideways….We might not need philosophy to know what we should do to be honest and good and wise, but reading a book like this can hardly make you less virtuous. If nothing else, it helped me clarify my basic moral belief-which is that you should take everyone seriously but yourself. So take me seriously, and buy this book."
Literary Review - Christopher Bray (03/01/2002)
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