Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions

Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions is a work by Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure (2021).

Core claims

• Sharpe and Ure demonstrate that Pierre Hadot’s thesis—that ancient philosophy was a set of spiritual exercises rather than a system of propositions—has been simultaneously overused as a slogan and underexplored as a diagnostic framework for modernity’s therapeutic crisis, and their book provides the corrective archaeology needed to make the thesis operational.
• The book reveals that the modern split between philosophy-as-theory and philosophy-as-practice is not a neutral disciplinary division but a wound whose consequences track directly onto the same subject-object chasm that depth psychology (from Freud through Jung and Hillman) has spent a century trying to heal from the other side.
• By mapping the full spectrum of contemporary “philosophy as a way of life” movements—from Stoic self-help to Foucaultian care of the self to contemplative education—Sharpe and Ure expose the unacknowledged competition between philosophy and psychotherapy for jurisdiction over the soul, a turf war whose resolution demands the very integration of logos and askēsis that both fields have individually failed to achieve.

Related questions

• How does the Hadot-Foucault disagreement over whether philosophical exercises aim at cosmic dissolution or aesthetic self-fashioning compare to the tension between Jung’s concept of the Self in Aion and Hillman’s polytheistic psychology in Re-Visioning Psychology?
• Edinger’s The Psyche in Antiquity reads the pre-Socratics as articulating archetypal images central to the Western psyche; how would Sharpe and Ure’s account of the Hellenistic schools as therapeutic communities challenge or enrich Edinger’s emphasis on symbolic content over lived practice?
• Tarnas argues in Cosmos and Psyche that depth psychology located itself “at the precise intersection of the two great polarities of the modern sensibility, the Enlightenment and Romanticism”—does the Sharpe and Ure mapping of contemporary philosophy-as-way-of-life movements suggest a third polarity, a recovered ancient therapeutics, that complicates Tarnas’s binary?

See also

• Library page: /library/ancient-roots/ure-philosophy-way-life/

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