Résumé
Résumé de L’Éthique de l’alimentation
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Readers who love philosophy, poetry, medicine and the history of ideas will enjoy this gathering of voices. It suits anyone curious about compassion and what we owe other creatures and ourselves.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
Would you eat your dinner if you had to kill the animal first, with your own hands? That one question runs through this book, and people have been asking it for twenty-five centuries. Howard Williams, a British writer and campaigner for dietary reform, gathered the answers into The Ethics of Diet, published in 1883.
The book is a chain. Each link is a short portrait of a thinker who doubted the habit of eating flesh, followed by what that thinker wrote. It runs from Hesiod and Pythagoras to Plato, Seneca and Plutarch, and on to Montaigne, Voltaire, Shelley and Schopenhauer. You meet doctors, poets and philosophers, and you see their reasons from health, economy and compassion.
Dans ce résumé
- 1The oldest voices place bloodless living at the startFree
- 2Plato and Ovid picture a simple city and a golden age
- 3Seneca ties plain eating to mercy and honest learning
- 4Plutarch argues from anatomy, pain and plain shame
- 5Early churchmen and pagan teachers preach restraint
- 6The Renaissance turns the question toward conscience
- 7Naturalists, poets and doctors add science and wit
- 8Enlightenment writers link diet to reason and justice
- 9Doctors and reformers test the diet on themselves
- 10Nineteenth century voices make compassion a rule of life
Point clé 1 sur 10
The oldest voices place bloodless living at the start
Williams opens with Hesiod, a Greek poet of the eighth century BC. In his poem Works and Days, humanity falls from a golden race to an iron one. The golden people live like gods and enjoy the fruits the earth gives freely. Williams reads this as the oldest picture of a peaceful life free from slaughter.
The brazen race is the first to hold bloody feasts, and it lives for the spear and the battle. So violence at the table and violence in war arrive together in the story.
Pythagoras, born on Samos about 570 BC, founds a society at Krotona in southern Italy. He forbids slain victims on altars and allows only cakes, fruit and other bloodless gifts. His chief rule is that no innocent animal should be killed or hurt. Iamblichus reports that people who shrink from killing animals will shrink more from killing people.
Critics point to the athlete Milo. Williams answers that early Greek athletes trained on vegetable fare, and that two thirds of the world lives mostly without flesh by necessity. How people eat and how they treat one another were linked from the beginning.
That’s 1 of 10 key points.
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About 11 h 50 min to read.Commencez 90 jours gratuitsPaperback, hardcover and large print, printed for you at cost, are on their way.Email me when it is printed
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 162,400 words
- Reading timeAbout 11 h 20 min
Questions about L’Éthique de l’alimentation
What is The Ethics of Diet about?
It collects the words of about fifty thinkers, from Pythagoras and Plutarch to Shelley and Schopenhauer, who questioned eating flesh. Williams adds short biographies and his own commentary, arguing from compassion, health, anatomy and economy.
Who was Howard Williams?
Howard Williams, M.A., was a British writer who campaigned for dietary reform. He compiled the chapters over five years for the Dietetic Reformer and published the book in 1883. He died in 1931.
What does catena mean in the subtitle?
Catena is Latin for chain. The book links authorities one after another, each chapter giving a short life of the thinker and extracts from their writings, so the argument builds link by link through history.
Which thinkers does the book cover?
It includes Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, Porphyry, Montaigne, Gassendi, Cheyne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lambe, Shelley, Lamartine, Graham and Schopenhauer, with an appendix adding Buddhist texts, Cowley, Tryon and Byron.
What is the main message of the book?
Williams argues that justice and compassion should extend to all creatures that can suffer. He holds that custom and appetite, not need, keep the slaughter-house in place, and that taking even one step toward humane living matters.
Cite this edition
Williams, Howard. The Ethics of Diet. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-ethics-of-diet.
Williams, H. (2026). The ethics of diet. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-ethics-of-diet (Original work published 1883)
Williams, Howard. The Ethics of Diet. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-ethics-of-diet.
@book{williams2026ethics,
author = {Williams, Howard},
title = {The Ethics of Diet},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-ethics-of-diet},
note = {First published 1883}
}
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