Tag: Hadot

• November 19, 2012

  Giving an honest self-inventory; or, how to be post-ironic

  The literary scholar Christy Wampole has called ours an “ironic age” in which “directness has become unbearable to us,” and in “How to Live Without Irony,” her New York Times Stone essay that appeared in this Sunday’s Review, she provides some clues for how we could live in a post-ironic manner.  These clues include saying what…
• October 8, 2012

  On Hadot’s ‘third way’ of doing philosophy

  I read an essay by Pierre Hadot’s main translator Michael Chase about philosophy as a way of life (PWL). In “Observations on Pierre Hadot’s Conception of Philosophy as a Way of Life,” Chase proposes that PWL could be a ‘third way’ of doing philosophy that is neither analytic nor Continental. In my experience (which chimes, I would…
• April 7, 2012

  ‘What was most essential for us could not be expressed’

  In this remarkable excerpt from the opening pages of The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009, 5-7, Pierre Hadot speaks about the boyhood mystical experiences that led him, many years later, to embrace philosophical inquiry. “What was most essential for us,”…