A filosofia antiga como maneira de viver: da antiguidade à contemporaneidade, segundo Pierre Hadot

Abstract

Furthermore, it has never proved to be homogeneous nor that there was a consensus on what Philosophy is or on its practices. In this context, this work has as main objective to defend that in the past Philosophy was practiced through spiritual exercises, which are no longer part of philosophical practice. For that, a comparative analysis is carried out starting from ancient philosophy, in Greece in the Hellenistic period, and reaching the contemporaneity. The secondary objective is to analyze contemporary philosophy in the light of ancient philosophy and draw a parallel between these two ways of philosophizing in order to answer whether philosophy has the same utility today as in the past. To accomplish these objectives, the work of Pierre Hadot, Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy, Jean-Joël Duhot's Socrates or the awakening of the soul, and Henry David Thoreau's Walden will be analyzed. With this research we came to the conclusion that today the Philosophy, without the practice of spiritual exercises, has become an area of knowledge accessible to few people, both in the physical issue of works and in the understanding of texts. In addition, it was possible to conclude that although Philosophy has lost a characteristic considered essential for the way of practicing ancient philosophy, it still maintains its usefulness for us as thinking beings with the aim of taking away a certain utilitarian urgency.