The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T.
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~220,000 words · 1,022 passages
Cite this work
- APACicero. (n.d.). The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T.. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-academic-questions-treatise-de-finibus-and-tusculan-disputations-of-m-t
- MLACicero. "The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T.." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-academic-questions-treatise-de-finibus-and-tusculan-disputations-of-m-t.
- ChicagoCicero. The Academic Questions, Treatise De Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, of M.T.. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-academic-questions-treatise-de-finibus-and-tusculan-disputations-of-m-t.
What it is about
A volume gathering three works of Cicero: the Academic Questions, on whether anything can be known for certain; the De finibus, on what the highest good is according to each school; and the Tusculan Disputations.
Context and history
Worth knowing: the Tusculans are also in the catalogue as a work of their own, so this entry overlaps with that one. The three books were written in the same year, 45 BC, and the grouping makes sense: Cicero reviews the Greek schools and translates them into Latin, inventing as he goes the philosophical vocabulary the West would use ever after. The De finibus is the most systematic of the three and the least read.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
In the works translated in the present volume, Cicero makes such constant references to the doctrines and systems of the ancient Greek Philosophers, that it seems desirable to give a brief account of the most remarkable of those mentioned by him; not entering at length into the history of their lives, but indicating the principal theories which they maintained, and the main points in which they agreed with, or differed fr