ABSTRACT
I conclude by returning to the key themes of the study. Using a carefully chosen quotation from Freud as a foil, I propose that a theory of cultivating our passionate attachments offers the opportunity to expand the remit of practical philosophy in precisely the way that Harry Frankfurt, Bernard Williams, and Susan Wolf demand, although in a manner that these thinkers do not take up themselves. Instead of scepticism about the role of philosophy to offer an account of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments, I suggest that it is well-suited to this task – not in the sense of being an exercise of self-cultivation as figures such as Nussbaum and Hadot suggest – but rather insofar as it can draw on the existing resources of the history of philosophy to show how contemporary moral philosophers can offer an account of how we cultivate our passionate attachments. By thinking imaginatively about the project of self-cultivation in terms of emerging technologies, philosophers can bring the Hellenistic project into the 21st century in a way that makes good on Foucault’s promise to offer a philosophical account of the ‘technologies of the self’.
