Proust changing life and being unwell, Moral Philosophy and Ethics

)I picked up one Alain De Botton's early publications at a secondhand bookshop recently and as I'm suffering from a bad back I am able to dedicate some time to reading it over the 'holiday' weekend.

An early de Botton

How Proust can change YOUR LIFE (for that is the name of book) could have been written specifically for such an occasion and although only about half way through I am able to appreciate some of the motivations behind both this book and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

I suppose there is something of Schopenhauer in the essence of Proust's tragic-comedic life, although there is angst and pain, Proust uses it to learn and to inform his art.

Moral Philosophy and Ethics (5)

Moral philosophy or ethics is defined as the area of philosophy which concerns itself with theories of ethics, and how we ought to live our lives.This leads to a challenging questions which we can ask ourselves about life that can be paraphrased as What is the purpose of life or What is the good life (not the TV programme with Felicity Kendal )? 

The Ancient Greeks had different answers and were ascribed to different tribes to answer these  questions, they included:


Cynics - Cynicism originates in the philosophical schools of ancient Greece that has a Socratic link.

Epicureans -are thought of as hedonists but in truth the particular concept is more complex, it is a system of ethics embracing  life where the idea is that pleasure or happiness is the chief good.

and

Stoics - these are members of the ancient Greek school of philosophy that was  founded by Zeno of Citium, they believed  that virtue and happiness can be achieved only by giving in destiny and the 'natural law'