Philosophy As a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault

Pierre Hadot is a significant and wide-ranging historian of ancient philosophy writing today. His work exhibits the combination of historical scholarship and philosophical argumentation that upsets any preconceived distinction between the history of philosophy and philosophy proper. Hadot's most important general philosophical work is entitled "Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy", which presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of the different conceptions of philosophy that have accompanied the trajectory and fate of the theory and practice of spiritual exercises.