How to Stay Calm When Fortune Takes Everything | Boethius’s Complete Philosophy

Fall asleep to the story of Boethius, the Roman philosopher who faced execution and answered it with reason alone.

In a prison cell in the north of Italy, fifteen centuries ago, one of the most powerful men in the kingdom sat condemned to death and did something no one expected. He wrote a long conversation with Philosophy herself. Tonight we follow the whole of that life and that book. We trace Boethius from the heights of Roman honor to his fall on a false charge, through the vast project by which he tried to carry the thought of Greece into a darkening West, and into the cell where, facing the end, he reached not for rescue but for the light of reason. We sit with Lady Philosophy as she confronts the wheel of fortune, the goods that never satisfy, the one good that all things seek, the puzzle of why the wicked prosper, and at last the great question of how a person can be free under a God who sees all of time at once. It is a quiet, patient argument about how a mind can hold steady when everything else is taken away.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Chapters: 0:00:00 Chapter 1: A Roman Life 0:11:16 Chapter 2: A Bridge Over the Ruins 0:16:54 Chapter 3: The Only Aristotle 0:25:10 Chapter 4: The Reality of Kinds 0:30:34 Chapter 5: The Four Roads to Wisdom 0:38:58 Chapter 6: Faith Put to Reason 0:45:49 Chapter 7: A Book Made in Chains 0:56:59 Chapter 8: The Woman Who Is Wisdom 1:04:23 Chapter 9: The Turning of the Wheel 1:15:38 Chapter 10: The Gifts That Fail 1:24:23 Chapter 11: The Good All Things Seek 1:35:51 Chapter 12: The Powerlessness of Evil 1:42:44 Chapter 13: The Pattern Behind the World 1:51:06 Chapter 14: The Eternal Present 2:03:03 Chapter 15: A Thousand Years of Readers

If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded