Preview: In July 2023 a group of philosophers gathered in Lisbon to address the boundaries, crossroads, and deadlocks in philosophy as a way of life (PWL). This short paper, based on my Lisbon talk, addresses all three topics. First, I want to highlight the boundary separating the university from everyday life. I offer a distinction between philosophers as academic professionals – university-based scholars –…
Abstract: The paper analyses the traditional concept of teleology, as well as its modern descendant, the concept of function (as used in the context of so-called functional explanations), against the background of such notions as purposive action, concepts, causality, time, and space-time. The author distinguishes several meanings of teleology and shows that their dialectics reveal…
Abstract: Hannah Arendt notably remarked that thinking, understood as the non-conclusive inner dialogue of “me” with “myself,” is most indispensable in those historical moments when “things fall apart.” War often occasions such moments, not just because of the moral and political turmoil that accompanies it or the physical damage it inflicts upon people…
Abstract: Hannah Arendt is one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers on totalitarian regimes. For her, such a political development becomes possible particularly because people abrogate their faculty of thinking. Totalitarianism, in turn, breeds conformity, engenders an ethics of alienation. Moreover, language, too, loses its hermeneutical ability to conjure up other possible, alternative, imaginative…
Abstract: Starting from the premise, recently shared by authors such as Jacques Derrida and Pierre Macherey (for whom a state of crisis is inherent to the university) that of the humanities constitute the specific terrain in which to propose new experiments, this article attempts to verify what is at stake in an approach to philosophy as a way of life, in the context…
Abstract: This paper forms as it were a draft for an as-yet-unwritten, decisive chapter on the history of philosophy as a way of life (PWL). It closely examines the texts by Schleiermacher, Fichte, Humboldt, and Schelling on the foundation of the modern research university, and the place of philosophy within it, written in the years surrounding the formation…
Abstract: The reception of Hadot’s work on the tradition of spiritual exercises among historians of medieval philosophy has rarely produced the results one might reasonably have expected. In this revisitation of the historiography on the notion of “intellectual felicity,” I thus hope to be able first to provide a corrective to the faulty understanding that some medievalists still seem…
Preview: Over the past few decades, the idea of philosophy as a way of life (PWL) has gained undeniable prominence in contemporary debates about the nature and function of philosophy. Pierre Hadot forged the notion to denote the specific way in which ancient philosophers conceived of and practiced philosophy, stressing its performative character and its…