A01=Alexander Nehamas
ancient greece
ancient philosophy
art of living
Author_Alexander Nehamas
Category=DS
Category=DSBB
Category=QDHA
Category=QDTS
complacency
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
foucault
greece
greek philosophy
interlocutor
irony
kierkegaard
montaigne
nietzsche
nonfiction
philosophical tradition
philosophy
platonic dialogues
platonism
practical philosophy
rationality
reason
socrates
thomas mann
unexamined life
western philosophy
Product details
- ISBN 9780520224902
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an 'art of living'. This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers - each fundamentally concerned with his own originality - return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind.
How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as 'the art of living' and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself.
Alexander Nehamas is Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the coeditor, with David J. Furley, of Aristotle's Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays (1994) and the author, with Paul Woodruff, of a translation and commentary on Plato's Phaedrus (1995) and Symposium (1989). He is also the author of Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985) and of Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (1998).
