

Plutarch, On Being A Busybody - Redirecting Curiosity to Better Topics - Sadler's Lectures
Jun 27, 2025
15:15
This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient Middle Platonist philosopher and biographer Plutarch's essay On Being A Busybody
This episode focuses specifically on one of the general practices he suggests to wean oneself away from this vice, namely deliberately redirecting one's attention from the usual objects of morbid curiosity towards better, or at least less bad objects. A person ought to focus on their own problems and troubles, not those of others, but they can also focus on the secrets of the natural world. If that's not interesting enough, and one needs something bad to stimulate, one can read those in histories or tragedies, rather than prying into the secrets of one's neighbors and contemporaries.
You can find the copy of the text I am using for this sequence on Plutarch's On Being A Busybody here - https://amzn.to/3IcyoX5
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