Philosophy as a Way of Life History, Dimensions, Directions
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Matthew Sharpe is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University, Australia. He is co-author of Zizek and Politics : a Critical Introduction (2010) and Understanding Psychoanalysis (2008) and author of Slavoj Zizek: a Little Piece of the Real (2004) and Camus, Philosophe: to Return to Our Beginnings (2016)
Michael Ure is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. He is author of Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (2008) and Nietzsche’s 'The Gay Science' (2018) and co-editor of The Politics of Compassion (2014)
Sharpe and Ure have written a fantastic book and have made an important contribution to PWL as a sub-discipline. They acknowledge their debt to Hadot whilst building upon his work with their own scholarship in an outstanding way. The book works well for both the specialist and as an introduction for the beginner. It encourages a radical and welcome rethinking of what philosophy actually is and allows us to see it in a new and exciting way, not just as something to be studied, but as something to be lived.
Philosophy in Review
Not just arguments but a call to a way of life – this is the vision of philosophy that is traced in this book, from Socrates to Nietzsche and Foucault. Inspired by the work of Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot, the authors offer for the first time an alternative history that gives philosophy’s transformative promise its due.
David Konstan, Professor of Classics, New York University, USA
I highly recommend this book. It offers an extraordinarily rich and insightful dive into what it means for philosophy to be a way of life--not simply an object of abstract study. Along the way, it showcases not only many giants of philosophy, but also neglected and underappreciated figures and traditions, all with skill, subtle attention to detail, and clarity. A very impressive and important work.
Stephen Grimm, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, USA
Sharpe and Ure have undertaken a hugely ambitious task and they have completed it admirably. They have produced a rich and fascinating study of both the concept and the history of philosophy understood as a way of life. It must surely become a standard point of reference in any future discussions of this topic but it also deserves to be widely read by anyone interested in the history of philosophy and in the very concept of philosophy itself.
John Sellars, Reader in Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
<i>Philosophy as a Way of Life</i> is a milestone in the contemporary re-appraisal of this ancient concept. For anyone interested in the history of philosophy or the topic of metaphilosophy, this surely fills an important gap in the literature. It will provide an invaluable foundation for future research in this area.
Donald Robertson, Author of "Stoicism And The Art Of Happiness" and "How To Think Like A Roman Emperor"
In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life in the Western tradition, Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure take us through the history of the idea from Socrates and Plato, via the medievals, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Foucault and Hadot. They examine the kinds of practical exercises each thinker recommended to transform their philosophy into manners of living.
Philosophy as a Way of Life also examines the recent resurgence of thinking about philosophy as a practical, lived reality and why this ancient tradition still has so much relevance and power in the contemporary world.
Introduction
Part 1: The Ancients
Ch. 1. Socrates and the Inception of Philosophy as a Way of Life
1.1 the atopia of Socrates
1.2 a founding exception
1.3 Socrates contra the Sophists
1.4 the elenchus as spiritual exercise
1.5 care of the psyche
1.6 the sage and the Socratic paradoxes
1.7 the Socratic legacy
Ch. 2. Epicureanism: Philosophy as a Divine Way of Life
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Epicureanism as way of life, therapy, and of writing
2.3 the turn inwards: against empty opinions, unnatural and unnecessary desires
2.4 Epicurus’ revaluation of happiness, pleasure and the good
2.5 the gods and the figure of the sage
2.6 the four-fold cure, and physics as spiritual exercise
2.7 spiritual exercises in the garden
2.7` Criticisms
Ch. 3. Stoicism: Philosophy as the Art of Living
3.1 Wisdom, knowledge of things human and divine, and an art of living
3.2 The Socratic lineage: dialectic, the emotions, and the sufficiency of virtue
3.3 From Musonius Rufus to Seneca
3.4 Epictetus’ Paranetic Discourses, and his Handbook
3.5 Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (Ta Eis Heauton)
Ch. 4. Platonisms as Ways of Life
4.1 Introduction: Platonisms
4.2 From Arcesilaus to Pyrrhonism: scepticism as a way life
4.3 Cicero: the philosopher as rhetorician and physician of the soul
4.4 Plotinus’ philosophical mysticism
4.5 Boethius and the end of ancient philosophy
Part 2: medievals and early moderns
Ch. 5. Philosophy as a way of life in the middle ages
5.1 On Christianity as “philosophy”
5.2 Monastic philosophia, and the Christianisation of spiritual exercises
5.3 Scholasticism, the theoreticisation of philosophia, & the ascendancy of dialectic
5.4 Counter-strains: from Abelard to Dante’s Il Convivio
Ch. 6. The Renaissance of Philosophy as a Way of Life
6.1 Philosophy, the humanisti, and the ascendancy of rhetoric
6.2 Petrarch’s Christian-Stoic medicines of the mind
6.3 Montaigne: The essayist as philosopher
6.4 Justus Lipsius’ Neostoicism
Ch. 7. Cultura Animi in Early Modern Philosophy
7.1 The end of PWL (again)?
7.2 Francis Bacon: the Idols and the Georgics of the mind
7.3 On Descartes, Method and Meditations
Ch. 8. Figures of the philosophe in the French enlightenment
8.1 “The philosophe”
8.2 Voltaire and the view from Sirius
8.3 Diderot and his Seneca
Part 3: the moderns
Interlude: The Nineteenth Century Conflict between PWL and University Philosophy
Ch. 9. Schopenhauer: Philosophy as the Way Out of Life
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Philosophy against sophistry (again)
9.3 Two cheers for Stoicism
9.4 The Saint versus the Sage
9.5 Schopenhauerian salvation
Ch. 10. Nietzsche: Philosophy as the Return to Life
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Nietzsche’s metaphilosophical meditations
10.3 Nietzsche’s philosophy as a spiritual exercise
10.4 Nietzsche’s spiritual exercise: eternal recurrence
10.5 Conclusion
Ch. 11. Foucault’sReinvention of Philosophy as a Way of Life
11.1 Philosophical heroism: Foucault’s Cynics
11.2 Foucault’s reinvention of Philosophy as a Way of Life
11.3 Genealogy as spiritual exercise
11.4 Conclusion
Conclusion
1. PWL, today
2. History, declines and rebirths
3. Criticisms
4. PWL of the future?
For the most part academic philosophy is considered a purely theoretical discipline that aims at systematic knowledge; contemporary philosophers do not, as a rule, think that they or their audience will lead better lives by doing philosophy. Recently, however, we have seen a powerful resurgence of interest in the countervailing ancient view that philosophy facilitates human flourishing. Philosophy, Seneca famously stated, teaches us doing, not saying. It aims to transform how we live. This ancient ideal has been continually reinvented from the Renaissance through to late modernity. It is now central to contemporary debates about philosophy’s role and future.
This series is the first synoptic study of the reinventions of the idea of philosophy as an ethical pursuit or ‘way of life’. Collectively and individually the books in this series will answer the following questions:
1. How have philosophers reanimated the ancient model of philosophy? How have they revised ancient assumptions, concepts and practices in the light of wider cultural shifts in the modern world? What new ideas of the good life and new arts, exercises, disciplines and consolations have they formulated?
2. Do these reinventions successfully re-establish the idea that philosophy can transform our lives? What have been the standard criticisms of this philosophical ambition and how have they been addressed?
3. What are the implications of these new versions of philosophy as a way of life for contemporary issues concerning the nature of philosophy, its procedures, limits and ends, and its relationship to wider society?
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Matthew Sharpe is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Deakin University, Australia. He is co-author of Zizek and Politics : a Critical Introduction (2010) and Understanding Psychoanalysis (2008) and author of Slavoj Zizek: a Little Piece of the Real (2004) and Camus, Philosophe: to Return to Our Beginnings (2016)
Michael Ure is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. He is author of Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (2008) and Nietzsche’s 'The Gay Science' (2018) and co-editor of The Politics of Compassion (2014)