83:4 October 2000
Philosophy as a Way of Life 

Advisory Editor: James Miller, New School, NYC

There has been a recent surge of interest in selfhood, and in the therapeutic uses of philosophy, a renaissance associated with, among other philosophers, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Alexander Nehamas and Stanley Cavell. Many other philosophers nevertheless remain suspicious about approaching philosophy as a way of life. They are reluctant to dwell on the injunction that Socrates received from the oracle at Delphi. It was not to found an academy, or to teach a course in logic; it was, rather, "to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others." What - if anything - can that Delphic injunction mean today? How, if at all, is philosophy related to therapy? Does the ability to lead an examined life presuppose rules, or principles, as to how this examination should proceed? Or, on the contrary, is the philosophical examination of life best pursued (as Montaigne, for one, implies) in the absence of fixed rules and principles? And in any case, how - if at all - does the pursuit of philosophy as a way of living relate to the content of philosophy as it is currently taught in the classroom? These and related questions will be the focus of the present issue of The Monist.

Table of Contents:

Martha C. Nussbaum 

Four Paradigms of Philosophical Politics

Richard Flathman 

The Self Against and For Itself: Montaigne and Sextus Empiricus on Freedom, Discipline and Resistance

Steven Affeldt 

Society as a Way of Life: Perfectibility, Self-Transformation, and the Origination of Society in Rousseau

Richard Shusterman 

Somaesthetics and Care of the Self: The Case of Foucault

Joseph Sen 

On Slowness on Philosophy