Pierre Hadot is Professor Emeritus at the Collège de France, where he held the Chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Thought. Most of his major works have been translated into English, including Philosophy as a Way of Life, What is Ancient Philosophy? (1995), and The Veil of Isis (2006). His most recent book is N'oublie pas de vivre. Goethe et la tradition des exercices spirituels (2008).Arnold I. Davidson is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Professor of the History of Political Philosophy at the University of Pisa. He has written widely on contemporary French philosophy, is the English language series editor of Michel Foucault's courses at the Collège de France, and is the author of The Emergence of Sexuality (2001).Jeannie Carlier is Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She has published essays on philosophy and religious practices in late antiquity and is a specialist in Neoplatonism.

• @fmct:Contents @toc4:Introductioniii @toc2:1Tied to the Apron Strings of the Church000 2Researcher, Teacher, Philosopher000 3Philosophical Discourse000 4Interpretation, Objectivity and Nonsense000 5Unitary Experience and Philosophical Life000 6Philosophical Discourse as Spiritual Exercise000 7Philosophy as Life and as a Quest for Wisdom000 8From Socrates to Foucault. A Long Tradition000 9Inacceptable?000 10The Present Alone is Our Happiness000 @toc4:Postface000 Notes000 Index000

"There is much here that could affirm and inform a philosophical counseling practice, both in attitude and content. There is much here to remind ourselves of the importance of spiritual or philosophical exercises in our own trying times."—Helen Douglas, Philosophical Practice "Hadot's refreshing efforts to free philosophy and its history from the sterile constraints of abstract theorizing and academic specialization find a lively and productive outlet in the interviews collected here. Introduced by Jeannie Carlier, a French scholar of Neo-platonic religious thought and friend of Hadot, and conducted in turns by Carlier and Arnold Davidson, the American philosopher and intellectual historian most responsible for the introduction and dissemination of Hadot's work in English-speaking contexts, these conversations explore in depth and varied detail both the personal and the intellectual development of a scholar whose own work insists above all that the personal or existential cannot rightly or fruitfully be separated from the intellectual or philosophical. Enacting the kind of dialogue that Hadot believes essential to any philosophy that would constitute a living relation between persons rather than an abstract relation to ideas, these interviews could not find a more suitable subject."—Thomas A. Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara "If your own experience of 'Philosophy 101' way back when was just shy of miserable, disconnected from the daily or generally incoherent—gridlocked, for instance, in self-serving terms—here, in The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Cartier and Arnold I. Davidson, a good-souled man—Hadot himself—winks. He seems to say, 'Here's what happened, and here's why philosophy really is for you.' And if you are a teacher or a pedagogue, it's for you all the more."—Teachers College Record