The Greek and Roman foundations — the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools that followed.
10 topics · 18 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Apology
Plato · 399 BCE
Socrates defends his practice of questioning Athens's authorities at his trial, arguing that an unexamined life is not worth living even at the cost…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Symposium
Plato · 385 BCE
Stages seven speeches on love that ascend from bodily attraction to the contemplation of beauty itself, and lets Alcibiades' drunken intrusion test…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle · 340 BCE
The good life is activity in accordance with virtue, and virtue is a disposition trained by habit rather than taught by rule.
+8 more at this level
12 of 18 works
Plato
Socrates defends his practice of questioning Athens's authorities at his trial, arguing that an unexamined life is not worth living even at the cost of his own.
Assumes nothing; it is the trial of Socrates told plainly, and the usual place to start with Plato
about 65 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyEpicurus
Death is nothing to us, because while we exist death is not present, and once death is present we no longer exist, so fearing it rests on a confusion rather than a real threat.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Epictetus
Records, in the plain speech of his own lectures rather than the polished aphorisms later drawn from them, the Stoic case that only our own judgements and choices are up to us, and that freedom consists in wanting only those.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Epictetus
Distinguishes sharply between what is up to us — judgement, desire, will — and what is not, arguing that all suffering comes from confusing the two, and that only the former is within our power to control.
about 45 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Plato
Stages seven speeches on love that ascend from bodily attraction to the contemplation of beauty itself, and lets Alcibiades' drunken intrusion test the account against a real desire for a real person.
about 2 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Plato
Asks whether virtue can be taught and, unable to answer, produces the paradox of enquiry — that you cannot search for what you do not already know — and answers it with recollection.
about 90 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyLucretius
Argues in verse that everything is atoms and void, that the soul dies with the body, and that grasping this is the cure for the fear of death and of the gods.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Diogenes Laërtius
Compiles the biographies, sayings and doctrines of the Greek philosophers from Thales to the Hellenistic schools, and remains the main surviving source for many of their lives and lost works.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Eduard Zeller
Surveys Greek philosophy from the Presocratics through the Neoplatonists as a connected development of problems about nature, knowledge and conduct, rather than a list of unrelated systems.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Aristotle
The good life is activity in accordance with virtue, and virtue is a disposition trained by habit rather than taught by rule.
Assumes no Greek and no prior Aristotle, though knowing that eudaimonia means flourishing saves early confusion
about 7.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyHeraclitus
Argues in aphorisms that reality is constituted by ceaseless change held in tension by an underlying logos, so that opposites are two aspects of one thing rather than two things.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Parmenides
Argues in verse that what is cannot come from what is not, so being must be single, unchanging and eternal, and that the world of change our senses report is mere appearance.