ABSTRACT
Attachment is about putting people's trust in one place, about investing all their emotional intensity in it and attachment involves a degree of naivety, a simplicity involving acceptance of things at face value rather than speculating on hypothetical. Pierre Hadot's argument that philosophy is a way of life and not just an academic exercise is one that is particularly amenable to the discussion on acceptance. Both Hadot and Nussbaum note that the spiritual exercises of the ancient philosophers were based on a concern for the here and now, for how we live in the present. Martha Nussbaum states that, for Epicurus, the goal of an uncorrupted person is the continued undisturbed and unimpeded functioning of the whole creature. Epicurus, like philosophers from other rival schools of ancient philosophy, such as Scepticism and Stoicism is concerned with controlling desire and with the development of precepts that will achieve this control.
