In his classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell has discussed what he discerns to be the overall pattern of the life-stories of heroes who commit themselves to live heroic lives of virtue. (For another discernment of the most salient pattern, based on C. G. Jung's work, see Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness.) Stories of imaginary heroes who committed themselves to live heroic lives of virtue are too numerous to enumerate here. But out of the ancient Western world have come stories about three historical persons who committed themselves to striving to live a heroic life of virtue: Socrates, Jesus, and Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. By definition, all saints canonized by the Roman Catholic Church are supposed to have led heroic lives of virtue. That does not mean that they were perfect. But it does mean that their efforts to live virtuous lives were heroic. More Americans should commit themselves to striving to live heroic lives of virtue, instead of living like anti-heroes such as Shakespeare's character Falstaff. To Falstaff, the word "honor" is nothing but an empty sound signifying nothing but sound and fury. That's the anti-hero for you. But the hero knows better. The hero values self-love and self-respect and self-regard. As a result, the hero is committed to striving to live a heroic life of virtue.
Chesterton, G. K. St. Francis of Assisi (orig. 1923) and St. Thomas Aquinas (orig. 1933). Volume two of The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986, pages 25-133 and 419-551, respectively.
Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas lived distinctively different heroic lives of virtue. G. K. Chesterton's biographies of Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas are classic works.
Cicero. On Obligations. Translated from Latin and with an Introduction and Notes by P. G. Walsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Cicero is as famous as you can get. His treatise On Obligations (Latin, "De officiis") is a rightly famous classic work.
Colish, Marcia L. The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1990.
Collins, Susan D. Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Friendship. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Comte-Sponville, Andre. A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Use of Philosophy in Everyday Life. Translated from the 1996 French edition by Catherine Temerson. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2001.
Cushman, Robert E. Therapeia: Plato's Conception of Philosophy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958.
This is probably the most startling title of any book in this list. For Plato, philosophy was a way of life, the way of life in which one engaged in philosophic dialogue. But when one person engages in philosophic dialogue with another person, both of them are at risk of being changed as a result of their philosophic dialogue. So Plato is arguably the pioneer of what Albert Ellis refers to as rational-emotive-behavioral therapy.
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