This collection of writings from Pierre Hadot (1992-2010) presents, for the first time, previously unreleased and in some cases untranslated materials from one of the world's most prominent classical philosophers and historians of thought.As a passionate proponent of philosophy as a 'way of life' (most powerfully communicated in the life of Socrates), Pierre Hadot rejuvenated interest in the ancient philosophers and developed a philosophy based on their work which is peculiarly con...

Abolitionist thought visualizes a world without prisons – or a radical reduction or transformation of prisons and punishment. This fascinating book explores the abolitionist ideas of key early socialists and anarchists, writing from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. It considers how these radical thinkers can provide insights into our present condition, both by highlighting the harms of punishment and by pointing to inspiring alternatives to current policy and practice.By ...

Bringing the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem into dialogue, Federico Testa examines the notions of life and norms underlying our modern experience of politics.Today's global health crisis acts as a stark reminder that life is at the core of our political debates and dilemmas. We can no longer think of forms of political organization, citizenship and participation without considering the materiality and precarity of our own organic life. Ours ...

This is the first English translation of a compelling and highly original reading of Epicurus by Jean-Marie Guyau. This book has long been recognized as one of the best and most concerted attempts to explore one of the most important, yet controversial ancient philosophers whose thought, Guyau claims, remains vital to modern and contemporary culture. Throughout the text we are introduced to the origins of the philosophy of pleasure in Ancient Greece, with Guyau clearly demonstrating how th...

'my philosophy is like Thebes with a hundred gates: one can enter from all sides and through each gate arrive at the direct path to the centre' Schopenhauer's two essays On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morals form his complete system of ethics. Their doctrines, continuous with those in his major work The World as Will and Representation, are presented here in more accessible, self-contained form. Schopenhauer argues, in uniquely po...

What does it mean to be responsible for our actions? In this brief and elegant study, Giorgio Agamben traces our most profound moral intuitions back to their roots in the sphere of law and punishment. Moral accountability, human free agency, and even the very concept of cause and effect all find their origin in the language of the trial, which Western philosophy and theology both transform into the paradigm for all of human life. In his search for a way out of this destructive paradigm, Ag...

Proclus of Lycia (412–485) was one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, producing the most systematic version of late Neoplatonic thought. He exercised enormous influence on Byzantine, medieval, Renaissance and German Classical philosophy, ranking among the top five of ancient philosophers in terms of the number of preserved works. Despite this he is rarely studied now, the enormous intricacy of his system making the reading of his treatises difficult for beginners. This book provide...

After Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, from the third century BCE onwards, developed the third great classical conception of wisdom. This book offers a reconstruction of this pivotal notion in Stoicism, starting out from the two extant Stoic definitions, 'knowledge of human and divine matters' and 'fitting expertise'. It focuses not only on the question of what they understood by wisdom, but also on how wisdom can be achieved, how difficult it is to become a sage, and how this difficulty c...

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 resur...

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus has been one of the most influential of ancient thinkers, both in antiquity itself and in modern times. Theodore Scaltsas and Andrew S. Mason present ten specially written papers which discuss Epictetus' thought on a wide range of subjects, including ethics, logic, theology, and psychology; explore his relations to his predecessors (including his two philosophical heroes, Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic, as well as the earlier Stoic tradition); and examine h...

“The working hypothesis is this: it is true that sexuality as experience is obviously not independent of codes and systems of prohibitions, but it needs to be recalled straightaway that these codes are astonishingly stable, continuous, and slow to change. It needs to be recalled also that the way in which they are observed or transgressed also seems to be very stable and very repetitive. On the other hand, the point of historical mobility, what no doubt change most often, what are most fra...

‘We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece’, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote. It is in Greek that the questions which shaped the destiny of Western culture were asked, and so were the first attempts at an answer, and the search for a method of investigation. This book tries to rediscover the propulsive force that for over two millennia spread, and still lives in our system of thought. By systematically quoting the very words of ...