Paper [draft form] for OUP 2016 collection edited by Alberto Vanzo et al, defending the very idea that ancient philosophy can be read according to the rubric of 'philosophy as a way of life' most famously associated with Pierre Hadot's work. The four critiques of this metaphilosophical and philological rubric the chapter considers are these. Firstly, ancient philosophy as 'philosophy' just did not or could not have involved anything like the ‘spiritual practices’, ‘technologies of the self’, or 'technai of living' that the Hadots, Foucault, and Sellars ostensibly describe for us in their work on the ancient philosophers, aiming at curing subjects’ unnecessary desires or bettering their lives. (2) Secondly (and as such), any such metaphilosophical sense of putative ‘philosophy’ unacceptably downplays the defining role of ‘hard intellectual analysis’, ‘serious philosophical reasoning’ or ‘rigorous argument’ , collapsing ‘philosophy’ into religion, or mysticism, or psychology, or psychotherapy, or ‘chicken soup for the soul’. (3) Thirdly, Hadot et al’s claims that ancient philosophy was not restricted to the business of theory-construction, but embraced ‘a much broader range of activities aimed at securing wisdom and happiness by a variety of means including but not restricted to rational inquiry’ are accordingly false as historical claims about ancient philosophy and philosophers. And (4) fourthly, to the extent that we must (despite (3)) admit that some ancient thinkers did unmistakably engage in or recommend extra-cognitive forms of transformative practice, these thinkers were not true or important philosophers; or else they belonged to late antiquity, when philosophy in its true, definitively rational-theoretical forms had gone into decline, giving way to the age of faith. The key text critically considered in detail, as exemplifying these kinds of criticisms, is John M. Cooper's Pursuits of Wisdom.

This paper examines Shaftesbury’s reflections on the nature of philosophy in his Askêmata notebooks, which draw heavily on the Roman Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. In what follows I introduce the notebooks, outline Shaftesbury’s account of philosophy therein, compare it with his discussions of the nature of philosophy in his published works, and conclude by suggesting that Pierre Hadot’s conception of ‘philosophy as a way of life’ offers a helpful framework for thinking about Shaftesbury’s account of philosophy.

Draft of chapter 3 of Philosophy as a Way of Life Primer (with M. Ure, for 2020), addressing the Stoics, that school which above all we tend to associate with philosophy as a manner of living tout court. Part 1 addresses the Stoic conception of wisdom, as both knowledge of things human and divine, and an art (techne) of living. Part 2 addresses the Stoics; Socratic lineage: dialectic, the emotions, and the sufficiency of virtue. Part 3 looks at Musonius and Seneca, focusing in the former on his conception of the place of exercises in philosophy, and in the latter, on his consolations. Part 4 looks at Epictetus, the Roman Socrates (and the Roman Diogenes) and his conception of the disciplines of philosophical practice; Part 5 looks at Marcus Aurelius's Meditations as hypomnemata with an especial focus on the place of physics in Marcus' conception of the philosophical art of living.

The practical aspect of ancient philosophy has been recently made a focus of renewed metaphilosophical investigation. After a brief presentation of three accounts of this kind developed by Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault, the model of the therapeutic argument developed by Nussbaum is called into question from the perspectives offered by her French colleagues, who emphasize spiritual exercise (Hadot) or the care of the self (Foucault). The ways in which the account of Nussbaum can be defended are then discussed, including both a ‘negative’ defense, i.e. the indication of the weaknesses of Hadot and Foucault’s proposals, and a ‘positive’ one focused on the points in which Nussbaum can convincingly address doubts about her metaphilosophical account. In response to these analyses, some further remarks made by Hadot and Foucault are discussed in order to demonstrate that their accounts are not as distant from Nussbaum after all. Finally, a recent metaphilosophical study by John Sellars together with a therapeutic (medical) model developed by the author of the present article are suggested as providing a framework for potential reconciliation between all three accounts discussed and a resource for further metaphilosophical studies.

This conference paper (Singapore 2013) ventures a preliminary comparison between Stoicism and Buddhism, based on recent work on the former tradition situating it as a lived philosophy. Part I proposes that there are remarkable parallels between the Stoics’ descriptions of the causes of unhappiness with the Buddhist enumeration of the three kleśas of attachment, aversion, and ignorance. Part II examines the parallels between the Buddhist conception of the 'ethical substance' we are working on when we undertake meditative practice and the Stoic accounts of the pathē. Part III examines the way that, in Buddhist and in Roman Stoic texts, existential practices are clearly recommended (often in the imperative) as means to cultivate what the Buddhist tradition calls 'mindful attention' to the present moment, the transience of particular things, and non-attachment or “reservation” (hypexairēsis) concerning such 'externals' or ‘indifferents’. Our concluding remarks reflect on the work done, its limits, and prospects for further comparative work on the two traditions in this vein.

This paper* starts from the contention that Pierre Hadot's unusually divided reception reflects the different dimensions of Hadot's own scholarly profile. Hadot's largely favourable reception amongst historians of ideas responds to the philological dimension of his work, but misses the implicit normativity involved in his recovery of the sense of ancient philosophy as a way of life. Analytic critics have registered but contested this normativity in ways that arguably also misrepresent his work. This paper contends that both receptions of Hadot have missed what can be called Hadot's unique philosophical problematic: uncovering through the ancient sources a kind of phenomenology of how a person would perceive and evaluate the world who had, counter-factually, attained a wholly enlightened, wholly "sage" mode of living. This phenomenology of sagesse, which is predicated on a metaphysical agnosticism, proves closer to the last Foucault than Hadot sometimes suggested: albeit embodying an aesthetics of "the whole," over against Foucault's aesthetics of (human) existence. * This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article in April 2018, published by Taylor & Francis in Angelaki, whose published final version is available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0969725X.2018.1451475

This paper looks closely at three untranslated papers Pierre Hadot wrote which directly address criticisms Nussbaum, Cooper, Williams et al have made (and which are examined in part 1) concerning the idea of philosophy as a way of life, including noncognitive exercises or technologies of self-formation. "La Philosophie Antique: Une Éthique ou une Pratique?'; 'Les Divisions des Parties de la Philosophie dans Antiquité', and 'Philosophie, Dialectique, Rhétorique dans L’Antiquité', we argue in the paper's second part, demonstrate that Hadot defended the inescapably vital role of philosophical argumentation in the ancient schools— while proposing that the ancient philosophers also recommended extracognitive 'spiritual exercises' to facilitate students’ living certain kinds of lives. Hadot indeed severally stresses, especially in 'Philosophie, Dialectique, Rhétorique', just how important practices of dialogue were throughout the classical period.

Part 1 of this chapter (preprint for Kurt Lampe and Janae Scholtz eds. *French and Italian Stoicisms* (in press)) examines the bases and sources of Hadot’s approach to ancient philosophy as a way of life (manière de vivre, mode/genre de vie), situating it in relation to Thomas Bénatouil’s distinction between two traditions in the twentieth-century French receptions of Stoicism. Part 2 addresses Hadot’s reading of the Roman Stoic Epictetus, which provides what he terms the “key” to his conception of Stoicism as a lived philosophy: the notion of three exercise-topics or “disciplines” (those of action, assent, and desire) aligned with the three parts of Stoic philosophical discourse (those of ethics, logic, and physics). Part 3 examines Hadot’s reading of Marcus Aurelius in this light, attentive particularly to Hadot’s remarkable development of the notion of “lived physics” as he finds it in the Meditations.

My thesis is that although knowledge acquired through philosophical discourse is necessary in ancient philosophy, it is not sufficient for the individual transformation which accompanies the choice of a way of life as proposed by the Hellenistic philosophical schools. This essay will have three parts. In the first part, I will reconstruct Cooper’s argument which stipulates, in contrast with Hadot’s thesis, that the essence of Hellenistic philosophy is simply the complete devotion to the practice of philosophical discourse in the form of study and discussion. Then, in the second part, I will show that Cooper’s thesis does not have enough evidential support and may also fail the sufficiency criteria. Finally, I will offer Cooper’s counter-argument to my objection before concluding. Given that Cooper and Hadot build their respective arguments using mostly texts from early Greek Stoics and later Roman Stoics respectively, the scope of my remarks in this essay will be largely limited to the review of stoicism.