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

Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: The ancients
	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
	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’s revaluation of happiness, pleasure and the good
		2.5 The gods and the figure of the sage
		2.6 The fourfold cure, and physics as spiritual exercise
		2.7 Spiritual exercises within the garden
		2.8 Criticisms
	3 The Stoic 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’s paranetic discourses, and his handbook
		3.5 Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (Ta Eis Heauton)
	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’s philosophical mysticism
		4.5 Boethius and the end of ancient philosophy
Part II: Medievals and early moderns
	5 Philosophy as a way of life in the Middle Ages
		5.1 On Christianity as ‘philosophy’
		5.2 Monastic philosophia, and the Christianization of spiritual exercises
		5.3 Scholasticism, the theoreticization of philosophia, and the ascendancy of dialectic
		5.4 Counter-strains: from Abelard to Dante’s il convito
	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’s Neostoicism
	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
		7.4 Conclusion: from experimental philosophy to the enlightenment
	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 III: The moderns
	Interlude: The nineteenth-century conflict between PWL and university philosophy
	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
	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
	11 Foucault’s reinvention of philosophy as a way of life
		11.1 Philosophical Heroism: Foucault’s Cynics
		11.2 Foucault’s reinvention of PWL
		11.3 Genealogy as a spiritual exercise
		11.4 Conclusion
	Conclusion: Philosophy as a way of life today and in the future
		1 PWL today
		2 History, declines and rebirths
		3 Criticisms
		4 PWL of the future?
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Proper names of primary sources
Index of concepts