Abstract

Pierre Hadot is famous for his work on ancient philosophy, and the notion that ancient philosophia was conceived in the Greek schools as a way of life, including existential practices to reshape students’ beliefs, desires, and actions. Yet his last published book before his death in 2010 was the study N’Oublie Pas de Vivre, on the oeuvre of the modern German thinker and litterateur, Goethe. Hadot’s work throughout refuses to make a sharp distinction between ancients and moderns, interested rather, as in this last book on Goethe, on the way the notion of philosophy as a bios has been carried over into modern thought in figures like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Montaigne, and even Kant. The paper is a critical reflection on Hadot’s conception of philosophy, suggesting he was as much ‘modern’ as ‘ancient’. Hadot’s final work on Goethe, we will argue, revealingly recasts his larger work on the ancients, and the singularity of his interpretation of classical Hellenistic and Roman thought.