Marcus Aurelius
Apr 4, 2025
The Book of Leviticus #
The Book of Leviticus, is the third book of the Old Testament, it took a bit for me to put together what I found to be parallels with philosophy. My first thoughts were of duty and responsibility. However, I had to push myself to find more from these seemingly excessive laws and rituals. Leviticus is basically a guide providing instructions for the Israelite people, particularly the priests, concerning worship, sacrifices, and the conduct of holy living following their liberation from Egypt.
Feb 7, 2025
The story starts with the Israelites living in Egypt after Joseph’s era.
Feb 7, 2025
My notes on the first book of the Old Testament
Feb 3, 2025
Literature Book List Challenge
- 1. Bhagavad Gita
- 2. Mahabharata
- 3. Gilgamesh
- 4. The Old Testament
- 5. Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
- 6. Herodotus: Histories
- 7. Sophocles: Plays
- 8. Aeschylus: Plays
- 9. Euripides: Plays (Hippolytus, The Bachantes, Electra, The Phoenician Women)
- 10. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
- 11. Plato: Dialogues
- 12. Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Ethics, De Anima
- 13. Alexandrian Poetry: The Greek Anthology
- 14. Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
- 15. Plutarch: Lives [presumably Parallel Lives]
- 16. Virgil: Aeneid, Bucolics, Georgics
- 17. Tacitus: Annals
- 18. Ovid: Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores
- 19. The New Testament
- 20. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
- 21. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
- 22. Catullus: Poems
- 23. Horace: Poems
- 24. Epictetus: Discourses
- 25. Aristophanes: Plays
- 26. Claudius Aelianus: Historical Miscellany, On the Nature of Animals
- 27. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica
- 28. Michael Psellus: Fourteen Byzantine Rulers
- 29. Edward Gibbon: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
- 30. Plotinus: The Enneads
- 31. Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History
- 32. Boethius: Consolations of Philosophy
- 33. Pliny the Younger: Letters
- 34. Byzantine verse romances
- 35. Heraclitus: Fragments
- 36. St. Augustine: Confessions
- 37. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
- 38. St. Francis of Assisi: The Little Flowers
- 39. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince
- 40. Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy (Tr. By John Ciardi)
- 41. Franco Sacchetti: Novelle
- 42. Icelandic sagas
- 43. William Shakespeare (Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V)
- 44. François Rabelais
- 45. Francis Bacon
- 46. Martin Luther: Selected Works
- 47. John Calvin: Institutio Christianae religionis
- 48. Michel de Montaigne: Essays
- 49. Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
- 50. René Descartes: Discourses
- 51. Song of Roland
- 52. Beowulf
- 53. Benvenuto Cellini
- 54. Henry Adams: Education of Henry Adams
- 55. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan
- 56. Blaise Pascal: Pensées
- 57. John Milton: Paradise Lost
- 58. John Donne
- 59. Andrew Marvell
- 60. George Herbert
- 61. Richard Crashaw
- 62. Baruch Spinoza: Treatises
- 63. Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Red and Black, The Life of Henry Brulard
- 64. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
- 65. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
- 66. Choderlos de Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses
- 67. Baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters
- 68. John Locke: Second Treatise on Government
- 69. Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
- 70. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics
- 71. David Hume: Everything
- 72. The Federalist Papers
- 73. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
- 74. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments
- 75. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes From the Underground, The Possessed
- 76. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
- 77. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Italian Journey
- 78. Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine: Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia
- 79. Eric Auerbach: Mimesis
- 80. William H. Prescott: Conquest of Mexico
- 81. Octavio Paz: Labyrinths of Solitude
- 82. Sir Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies
- 83. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power
Jan 13, 2025
Gilgamesh is king of Uruk; he is ⅔ god and ⅓ man and is a tyrannical ruler and big-time rapist. It’s going to be a challenge to find philosophical and stoic parallels, I think!
Dec 29, 2024
The Gita is a power struggle between two sides of a family: Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas, and their cousins, the Pandavas.
Dec 1, 2024
Book 2 (Sabha Parva) of the Mahabharata