Pierre Hadot 1922 – 2010

Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian of ancient thought. Trained as a classicist and editor of the Plotinian and Marcus-Aurelian corpora, he developed in a long series of essays the thesis that ancient philosophy is best understood not as a body of doctrine but as a way of life sustained by spiritual exercises. His Philosophy as a Way of Life and What is Ancient Philosophy? reshaped the modern reception of the Greek and Roman philosophical traditions, and his work influenced the later Foucault and a wide popular audience. He held a chair at the College de France.

Pierre Hadot was born in 1922 in Paris and grew up in Reims, in a devout Catholic family. He was ordained a priest in 1944 and taught philosophy in the seminary at Reims; in 1952 he left the priesthood and embarked on a secular academic career, joining the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. From 1964 he taught at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, and from 1982 to 1991 he held the chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Thought at the College de France.

His major works include Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision (1963), Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres (1971), the influential collection Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (1981, expanded in later editions), The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (1992), What Is Ancient Philosophy? (1995), and the late conversations The Present Alone Is Our Happiness (2001). His critical edition and translation of Marcus Aurelius was a long companion to his historical work.

Hadot recovered the ancient understanding of philosophy as a way of life — a practice of spiritual exercises shaping the self toward wisdom, rather than an academic discourse — and his readings of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Neoplatonism decisively influenced Michel Foucault's late work on the care of the self and the contemporary revival of Stoic ethics. He died at Orsay in 2010.