Albert Camus repeatedly denied the label “existentialist,” and pointed to his formative experiences of natural beauty and his early introduction to classical Greek thought and culture as determinative of his philosophy. Pierre Hadot, famous for his post-1970 work on philosophy as a way of life in classical antiquity, continued throughout his life to work on the history of Western conceptions of nature. In Le voile d’Isis, Hadot excavated a second strain of Western attitudes towards nature, alongside the instrumental or “Promethean” (...) approach dominant in modernity: this is that of the contemplative Orphic perspective, closely tied in antiquity to philosophical regimens of spiritual exercises to transform philosophers’ ways of seeing. This paper will argue that Camus and Hadot should be read as two twentieth century “Orphic” figures in this sense, in a way that at once singles them out against almost all other European contemporaries, as well as speaking to our ecological concerns today. Yet the only comparative piece on the two thinkers to date, by Matthew Lamb, misses this shared contemplative, Orphic core to their positions. This paper aims to redress this shortcoming in the reception of the two figures. (shrink)

The fact that the notion of ‘practice’ has achieved an ever-increasing relevance in the most various fields of knowledge must not overshadow that it can be interpreted in so many different ways as to orient fairly different historiographical paradigms and philosophical conceptions. Starting with the two main issues of Hadot’s criticism of Foucault (the lack of a distinction between joy and pleasure and the fact that his account does not underscore that the individual Self is ultimately transcended by universal Reason), (...) I have tried to show how the two scholars’ philosophical and historiographical approaches entail a different notion of ‘practice’. According to Hadot, the performativity of a practice (or spiritual exercise) is intimately tied to a universal which transcends the individual self, whereas Foucault maintains that it does not require the appeal to any universal, being exclusively grounded on the modes of exertion of the practices which constitute the individual Self. According to this address, pleasure is a fundamental notion in order to historicize the different ways in which the ethical subject structures itself. (shrink)

This intriguing work offers a new perspective on Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, critiquing modern receptions of such thought and highlighting the contribution it can make to contemporary Western philosophy. Mohammad Azadpur focuses on the thought of Alfarabi and Avicenna, who, like ancient Greek philosophers and some of their successors, viewed philosophy as a series of spiritual exercises. However, Muslim Peripatetics differed from their Greek counterparts in assigning importance to prophecy. The Islamic philosophical account of the cultivation of the soul to the (...) point of prophecy unfolds new vistas of intellectual and imaginative experience and accords the philosopher an exceptional dignity and freedom. With reference to both Islamic and Western philosophers, Azadpur discusses how Islamic Peripatetic thought can provide an antidote to some of modernity’s philosophical problems. A discussion of the development of later Islamic Peripatetic thought is also included. (shrink)