What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Pierre Hadot, 1995)

Pierre Hadot's thesis is fairly simple. Ancient philosophy was not just a discourse, but a way of life. While the discourse aspect has stayed with philosophy, the way of life aspect has fallen away and only returns intermittently through history. One could say (as Hadot does) that Christianity, poised as another type of philosophy (a "revealed" one), absorbed the way of life part. This would in turn lead to some of the periodic estrangements between philosophy and religion.

This one was for class, but, as was the case with the other class, I'm glad for having read it. I'm a history person. Philosophy has always proved challenging for me to wrap my brain around. Even though the introduction was a bit daunting, I found the layout of the book to be straightforward and the direction was clear. It served well as our "textbook" for the first half of the course. In fact, I feel a little more lost with a secondary resource accompanying our further path into medieval philosophy. As for those primary resources, we covered them a little spottily, so I'll be going through and catching up on the missing bits and reporting back here soon.

Although I just called it a textbook, this is actually very accessible to readers of all interests, not just philosophy nuts. Therefore, it's a staple at most decent public libraries, not just academic ones, in spite of being published by Harvard University Press.