Jean-Manuel Roubineau - The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic Audiobook

Written by The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic
Read by James Cameron Stewart
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps

The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic
By: Jean-Manuel Roubineau, Malcolm DeBevoise - translator, Phillip Mitsis - editor
Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
Length: 4 hrs and 30 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 07-16-24
Language: English
Publisher: Tantor Audio

Publisher’s summary

The ancient philosopher Diogenes—nicknamed “The Dog” and decried by Plato as a “Socrates gone mad”—was widely praised and idealized as much as he was mocked and vilified. A favorite subject of sculptors and painters since the Renaissance, his notoriety is equally due to his eccentric behavior, scorn of conventions, and biting aphorisms, and to the role he played in the creation of the Cynic school, which flourished from the 4th century B.C. to the Christian era. Jean-Manuel Roubineau paints a new portrait of an atypical philosopher whose life left an indelible mark on the Western collective imagination and whose philosophy courses through various schools of thought well beyond antiquity.

Roubineau sifts through the many legends and apocryphal stories that surround the life of Diogenes. Was he a counterfeiter? Did he meet Alexander the Great? Was he an apologist for incest, patricide, and anthropophagy? How did he actually die? Roubineau retraces the known facts of Diogenes’ existence.

Beyond the rehashed clichés, this book inspires us to rediscover Diogenes’ philosophical legacy—whether it be the challenge to the established order, the detachment from materialism, the choice of a return to nature, or the formulation of a cosmopolitan ideal strongly rooted in the belief that virtue is better revealed in action than in theory.

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