ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the contention that Pierre Hadot’s unusually divided reception attests to the different dimensions to Hadot’s own scholarly profile. From the perspective of any kind of historicism, meanwhile, any notion of “the” sage, with the definite article, seems similarly chimerical – a ceding of Hadot’s philological and historical nerve to his desire for spiritual orientation. Hadot’s deepest criticism of Foucault concerns his failure to register that ancient philosophy did not aim so much at a culture of the self, its beautification or refinement, as at the conversion, transformation or exceeding of the self. Hadot’s assessment of the historical adequacy of Foucault’s reconstruction of the Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans cannot detain us here. Beyond both Hadot’s critics amongst the analytics and the historians of ideas, the authors have claimed that Hadot’s unique philosophical contribution to contemporary debate, seen correctly, lies in his attempting to delineate a “phenomenology of sagesse.”.
