Pierre Hadot

Pierre Hadot is the French classicist and historian of ancient thought whose Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (1981) and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (1995) recovered the thesis that ancient philosophy — Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean, Neoplatonic — was not in the first instance a theoretical discipline but a way of life organized around spiritual exercises.

The thesis is load-bearing for the Seba tradition at two points. First, it restores the practice-dimension of the philosophical schools — the attention (prosoche), the examination of conscience, the meditation on death, the discipline of assent — which the modern academy had reduced to footnote and which the depth tradition had always needed. Second, Hadot’s work on Plotinus (Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, 1963) is the contemporary reading through which the Enneads became legible again as a contemplative manual rather than a system of speculative metaphysics. See philosophy-as-way-of-life and prosoche-stoic for the concepts he names in the graph.

Relationships

• plotinus
• philosophy-as-way-of-life
• prosoche-stoic