Philosophy As a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions

In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life in the Western tradition, Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure take us through the history of the idea from Socrates and Plato, via the medievals, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Foucault and Hadot. They examine the kinds of practical exercises each thinker recommended to transform their philosophy into manners of living. Philosophy as a Way of Life also examines the recent resurgence of thinking about philosophy as a practical, lived reality and why this ancient tradition still has so much relevance and power in the contemporary world.

Matthew Sharpe is is Associate Professor of
Philosophy at Deakin University, Australia.

Michael Ure is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. He is author of Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (2008) and Nietzsche's 'The Gay Science' (2018) and co-editor of The Politics of Compassion (2014)

Keith Ansell Pearson holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of acclaimed monographs on Nietzsche and Bergson and has published a number of essays on Guyau's ethics.

Daniel Conway is Reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, UK and a Research Associate at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has published extensively on LGBTQ+ activism and South African politics and society. He is the author of Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa (with Pauline Leonard, 2014) and Masculinities, Militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa, (2012). Conway is a previous chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Section of the International Studies Association.