Luck (and Lucklessness) in Ancient Greek Thought

Daniel Schillinger joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new book Luckless: The Idea of Luck in Ancient Greek Thought, which recently appeared with Oxford University Press.

Find out more about Daniel's work here: https://www.danielschillinger.com/

Ancient authors and texts

• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
• Euripides, Trojan Women (and Hippolytus)
• Thucydides
• Aristotle, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics (Daniel's book also contains a chapter on the Eudemian Ethics)

Other works/authors

• Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy; The Prince
• Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
• Arlene Saxenhouse, work on tragedy (see esp. her 1988 "The tyranny of reason in the world of the polis, in The American Political Science Review 82: 1261-1275)
• H.P. Stahl, Thucydides: Man's Place in History
• Leo Strauss, On Thucydides' War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians," chapter in The City and Man
• Bernard Williams, Moral Luck
• Adam Parry's scholarship on Thucydides
• And others: Arendt, Freud, Kant, Nietzsche, Rawls...

About our Guest

Daniel Schillinger is a Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches in the Directed Studies Program and offers seminars on Greek political thought. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Yale Center for Civic Thought and a recipient of the Lux et Veritas teaching prize.

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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