THE CYNICS or THE WISDOM OF JOYFUL PESSIMISM

ENJOY PHILOSOPHY MEETS WEEKLY EVERY SUNDAY BETWEEN 11.00 AND 14.00 AT EDUARDO VII PARK, HERE:** https://goo.gl/maps/5e3jKFEweXkNvDdK6

ITS THE GARDEN BETWEEN THE “CARLOS LOPES PAVILLION” AND THE “PRAIA NO PARQUE” RESTAURANT AT EDUARDO VII PARK.

THIS IS A GROUP FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN ENJOYING PHILOSOPHY.

NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE IS REQUIRED.

ONLY ETERNAL CURIOSITY AND THE PLEASURE OF KNOWLEDGE.

PLS KEEP UPDATED of any changes and updates on our WhatsApp Group:
Enjoy Philosophy Lisbon Group Access-Link

We will learn, debate, enjoy and investigate philosophers and diverse themes from the philosophical perspective. Each reunion is structured as a conversation among all attendees about that day s philosopher softly moderated by the organizer. The conversation will kick-off from the very brief suggested reading providing easy access to all attendees both to the philosopher and the conversation.

Let´s be greek and dive today on…

the CYNICS, the greek hellenistic philosophical school that made of freedom, in its deepest and wildest sense, the meaning of men s lives. Lets be free... as the Dogs are free. Therefore the name... κυνικός (kynikos) 'dog-like'... far from conventions... self governed, master of themselves, listening to no other law than one s own nature. The expression was originarily coined as a curse by their critics, given their tendency to publicly satisfy their natural needs - You behave like a dog - to be proudly assumed by them as a flattery - I do indeed -. This Socratic school deepens a substantial part of Socrates ethics: a radical rejection of social conventions and sophistication as fundamentally false, unfair and privileging the powerful elites while making men deeply evil and unhappy. Simple is Good. Their stand therefore towards "natural simplicity" is both Political and Metaphysical, and its precisely this consistency what gave the school a strength that survived in many other thought schools, mainly Stoicism (and Spinoza, the Stoïc of modernity) : Stoïcs integrated Cynicism with the Heraclitean vision of Logos and moderated its "excesses", its uncompromising radicality and permanent provocation as a way of life, and made it more "swallowable" by the political elites, to the point that this "alternative" "anti-stablishment" movement became for a period, under its stoic mutation, the un-official credo of the Roman "establishment". Cynics proudly reject any ideology, any power structure, any social convention, any reliance on scientific or technical knowledge, all of them doomed to make men evil and unhappy, and therefore philosophically root Anarchism, most "Anti-establishment" ideologies and are at the core of the individual critical sense towards societal imperatives. Not a small feat.

So lets think with the Cynics... about their happy, hopeful, joyful pessimism...