Ian Hacking writes:

Hadot, who is now 85, is a great scholar of Neoplatonism. He is working on a definitive edition of Marcus Aurelius. He is an extraordinary guide to the history of the idea of nature from Heraclitus to now. You will find yourself in the company of a wise Greek, a pagan, a philosopher who believes that a role of philosophy is to teach us how to live. (See, for example, the essays collected in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, 1995.) Pagan? Monotheism has been so triumphant that we have forgotten about pagans. Hadot recalls a pagan prefect, appalled that a Christian emperor wanted to remove the Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate: ‘We contemplate the same stars, the Heavens are common to us all, and the same world surrounds us. What matters the path of wisdom by which each person seeks the truth?’

(LRB 10 May 2007)

Harvard | hardback 399 pp. |ISBN: 9780674023161