Matthew Sharpe

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant's famous rubric of the 'primacy of practical reason'. In this way, too, Foucault's later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant's Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any 'break' or 'turn' in Foucault's work. In line with Foucault's repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a 'return to the ancients', I argue that Foucault's writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.

What follows is a work of critical reconstruction of Camus' thought. It aims to answer to the wish Camus expressed in his later notebooks, that he at least be read closely. Specifically, I hope to do three things. In Part I, we will show how Camus' famous philosophy of the absurd represents a systematic scepticism whose closest philosophical predecessor is Descartes' method of doubt, and whose consequence, as in Descartes, is the discovery of a single, orienting certainty, on the basis of which Camus would proceed to pass beyond the 'nihilism' that conservative critics continued to level against him (MS 34). Part II will unfold the central tenets of Camus' mature thought of rebellion, and show how Camus' central political claims follow from his para-Cartesian claim to have found an irreducible or 'invincible' basis for a post-metaphysical ethics, consistent with the most thoroughgoing epistemic scepticism. Part III then undertakes to show that the neoclassical rhetoric and positioning Camus claimed for his postwar thought—as a thought of moderation or mesure, and a renewed Greek or Mediterranean naturalism—is more than a stylistic pretension. It represents, so I argue, a singular amalgam of modern and philosophical classical motifs which makes Camus' voice nearly unique in twentieth century ideas, and all the more worth reconsidering today. So let us proceed

In this paper, I explore the complex ethical dynamics of violence and nonviolence in Mahāyāna Buddhism by considering some of the historical precedents and scriptural prescriptions that inform modern and contemporary Buddhist acts of self-immolation. Through considering these scripturally sanctioned Mahāyāna ‘case studies,’ the paper traces the tension that exists in Buddhist thought between violence and nonviolence, outlines the interplay of key Mahāyāna ideas of transcendence and altruism, and comments on the mimetic status and influence of spiritually charged texts. It is the contention of this paper that violent scriptural metaphors can create paradigms of enactment that are paradoxically illustrative of the core ‘non-violent’ Mahāyāna virtues of compassion, giving, patience, and vigor. The discussion will show that these virtues are underpinned by the Mahāyāna philosophical mainstays of non-duality, bodhisattvic transcendent altruism, skillful means, and dependent co-origination.

This paper examines the theoretical ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the key progenitor of the global economic orthodoxy of the past two decades. It assesses Hayek's thought as he presents it: namely as a form of liberalism. Section I argues that Hayek's thought, if liberal, is hostile to participatory democracy. Section II then argues the more radical thesis that neoliberalism is also in truth an illiberal doctrine. Founded not in any social contract doctrine, but a form of constructivism, neoliberal thought at its base accepts the paradoxical need to "discipline subjects for freedom", however this might contravene peoples' natural, social inclinations. The argument is framed by reference to Aristophanes' great comedy, The Birds, whose off shore borderless empire ironically prefigures the dream of neoliberal social engineers, and their corporate supporters.

The notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique of ideology’ have been criticised in manyways. This essay examines theworks of two contemporary theorists who defend this theoretical category. Interestingly, both do this through pivotal recourse to categories drawn from modern aesthetic theory, and in particular Kant's third Critique. In thisway, they reanimate a theoretical concern with the intersection of politics and aesthetics that goes as far back as Plato. The essay's conclusion reflects on this “aesthetic turn” in the theory of ideology: what work it allows, and its limits.

This paper wants to draw out a common argument in three great philosophers and littérateurs in modern French thought: Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, and Albert Camus. The argument makes metaphysical and theological scepticism the first premise for a universalistic political ethics, as per Voltaire's: “it is clearer still that we ought to be tolerant of one another, because we are all weak, inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error.” The argument, it seems to me, presents an interestingly overlooked, deeply important and powerful contribution to the philosophical discourse of modernity. On one hand, theological and post-structuralist critics of “humanism” usually take the latter to depend either on an essentialist philosophical anthropology, or a progressive philosophy of history. The former, it is argued, is philosophically contestable and ethically contentious. The latter, for better or worse, is a continuation of theological eschatology by another name. So both, if not “modernity” per se, should somehow be rejected. But an ethical universalism – like that we find in Montaigne, Bayle, Voltaire, or Camus – which does not claim familiarity with metaphysical or eschatological truths, but humbly confesses our epistemic finitude, seeing in this the basis for ethical solidarity, eludes these charges. On the other hand, philosophical scepticism plays a large role in the post-structuralist criticisms of modern institutions and ideas in ways which have been widely taken to license forms of ethics which problematically identify responsibility, with taking a stand unjustifiable by recourse to universalizable reasons. But, in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus, our ignorance concerning the highest or final truths does not close off, but rather opens up, a new descriptive sensitivity to the foibles and complexities of human experience: a sensitivity reflected amply, and often hilariously, in their literary productions. As such, a critical agnosticism concerning claims about things “in the heavens and beneath the earth” does not, for such a “sceptical humanism,” necessitate decisionism or nihilism. Instead, it demands a redoubled ethical sensitivity to the complexities and plurality of political life which sees the dignity of “really-existing” others, whatever their metaphysical creeds, as an inalienable first datum of ethical conduct and reflection. After tracking these arguments in Montaigne, Voltaire, and Camus, the essay closes by reflecting on, and contesting, one more powerful theological argument against modern agnosticism's allegedly deleterious effects on ethical culture: that acknowledging ignorance concerning the highest things robs us of the basis for awe or wonder, the wellspring of human beings’ highest ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual achievements.

Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s own interventions, these essays critically interrogate his ideas, challenging him to respond directly which he does in an extended polemical reply that concludes the collection. This volume represents an exciting and important contribution to contemporary theoretical debate and adds significantly to the growing literature on Zizek.

Albert Camus’s 1947 novel La Peste and 1948 drama L’État de Siège, allegories of totalitarian power using the figure of the plague, remarkably anticipate Foucault’s celebrated genealogical analyses of modern power. Indeed, reading Foucault after Camus highlights a fact little-remarked in Discipline and Punish: namely, that the famous chapter on the ‘Panopticon’ begins by analysing the measures taken in early modern Vincennes following the advent of plague. Part III argues that, although Camus was cited as an inspiration by the nouveaux philosophes, he does not accept the reactionary motif of the total bankruptcy of the modern cultural and political worlds as hopelessly implicated in the totalitarian crimes. Indeed, Part IV highlights how Camus defends modern, descriptive scientific rationality against its totalitarian appropriations, alongside ‘the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention’ – positions which Part V suggests as Camus’s continuing poignancy and relevance in the period after post-structuralism.

This paper is a critical response to Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. We take up her book’s call for a “problematizing” history which challenges “taken-for-granted” preconceptions in order to contest Allen’s own representation of the thought of the enlightenment. Allen accepts that all the enlighteners agreed upon a stadial, progressive account of history, which she critiques epistemically and normatively (Part 1). But we show in Part 2, drawing on the work of Henri Vyverberg and other historians of eighteenth century ideas, that a cyclical, rise and fall account of historical succession was more prominent than the progressive narrative in leading enlighteners such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Condillac, Jancourt, Grimm, and Raynal, all of whom Allen does not mention. In Part 3, we show that not all thinkers of the enlightenment were pro-colonial or pro-imperialist, as Allen also presupposes in The End of Progress. By examining Abbé Raynal’s History of The Two Indies in Part 3, and notably its Diderotian interpolations, we show that many enlighteners propounded fierce criticisms of European colonialism and the slave trade, even calling directly for armed resistance against European infractions. In critical theorists’ search for chastened normative foundations, our concluding remarks contend, there is a need to develop more accurate, balanced, post-postmodern reckonings of the enlightenment.

This paper starts from the contention that Pierre Hadot’s unusually divided reception reflects the different dimensions of Hadot’s own scholarly profile. Hadot’s largely favourable reception amongst historians of ideas responds to the philological dimension of his work, but misses the implicit normativity involved in his recovery of the sense of ancient philosophy as a way of life. Analytic critics have registered but contested this normativity in ways that arguably also misrepresent his work. This paper contends that both receptions of Hadot have missed what can be called Hadot’s unique philosophical problematic: uncovering through the ancient sources a kind of phenomenology of how a person would perceive and evaluate the world who had, counter-factually, attained a wholly enlightened, wholly “sage” mode of living. This phenomenology of sagesse, which is predicated on a metaphysical agnosticism, proves closer to the last Foucault than Hadot sometimes suggested: albeit embodying an aesthetics of “the whole,” over against Foucault’s aesthetics of existence.

This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. In part iii, focusing upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touching on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and the early Wittgenstein—we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas, nearly-contemporary with Galileo’s mathematization of physics and carried forwards by Kant’s critical philosophy and account of the substanceless subject of apperception. In different terms than Slavoj Žižek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried, at the same time as it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which thinking and being could be the same.

ABSTRACTThis paper is a critical response to Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. We take up her book’s call for a “problematizing” history which challenges “taken-for-granted” preconceptions in order to contest Allen’s own representation of the thought of the enlightenment. Allen accepts that all the enlighteners agreed upon a stadial, progressive account of history, which she critiques epistemically and normatively. But we show in Part 2, drawing on the work of Henri Vyverberg and other historians of eighteenth century ideas, that a cyclical, rise and fall account of historical succession was more prominent than the progressive narrative in leading enlighteners such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Condillac, Jancourt, Grimm, and Raynal, all of whom Allen does not mention. In Part 3, we show that not all thinkers of the enlightenment were pro-colonial or pro-imperialist, as Allen also presupposes in The End of Progress. By examining Abbé Raynal’s History of The Two Indies in Part 3, and notably its Diderotian interpolations, we show that many enlighteners propounded fierce criticisms of European colonialism and the slave trade, even calling directly for armed resistance against European infractions. In critical theorists’ search for chastened normative foundations, our concluding remarks contend, there is a need to develop more accurate, balanced, post-postmodern reckonings of the enlightenment.

Albert Camus can be meaningfully read as an agent-focussed virtue ethicist, as David Sherman has suggested. Yet moving far beyond Sherman’s version of this claim, we show here how Camus accepts what are four definitive parameters of the classical authors’ conception of the virtues—the last of which takes him beyond today’s recognised “virtue ethicists.” Firstly, he understands the virtues as lasting, beneficent dispositions to think, feel, and act in certain ways. Secondly, he conceives the virtues as mastering the untethered passions: the sources of epistemic partiality and behavioural excess. Thirdly Camus conceives of the virtues as necessary accomplishments if people are to live fulfilled lives. Finally—and here bidding farewell to a solely theoretical approach—Camus appreciates that such self-mastery can only be achieved through education and habituation, and through the imitation of the kind of exemplars he holds up before us in his literary fiction.

In Part 1, we situate Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger in relation to the better known, broadly left-liberal approaches to interpreting Heidegger’s thought, stressing Dugin’s unusual focus on the German thinker’s “middle” or Nazi-era texts, and showing how this periodizing optic affects Dugin’s culminating reading of Sein und Zeit and its key axiological notion of authenticity (Part 1). Part 2 examines Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger’s radically pessimistic, trans-epochal critique of Western thought, centring around his striking reading of the esoteric notion of the “fourfold” or Gewiert. In this account, the essence of reality itself, the “crosshairs” of the fourfold, is provocatively depicted by Dugin as war, Polemos, Kampf, or Krieg, following the Heidegger of 1933–1936. In a move which echoes Heidegger’s own post-1938 relativizations of all distinctions between Nazism, liberalism and socialism – as well as the Shoah and mechanized agriculture – the Russian thinker hence ends by obviating any distinctions between liberal or democratic and totalitarian regimes, war and peace, and genocide and consumerism. All must be overcome in the “another beginning” destined for the new Russia, if it has the ears to hear.

This paper looks at two 20th century theories of tragedy: those of Cornelius Castoriadis and Albert Camus. The theories that each proffer of this ancient cultural form are striking. Against more standard views, both theorists stress that tragedy is a cultural form that has only arisen historically in cultures whose forms of religious thought have been laid open to question. In this way, both argue that tragedy is an important democratic cultural form, which stages the confrontation between a no longer unquestionable divine order, and human autonomy.The intent of the paper, from the start, is a political one. It wants to place Camus alongside Castoriadis as a 'post-Marxist' thinker, who belongs meaningfully to what Dick Howard has called 'the Marxian legacy'. More than this, it aims to do this by staging Camus' theorisation of tragedy, with Castoriadis', as a powerful riposte to the conservative criticism of democracy as a modern political form, that is, that it cannot muster sacral cultural forms forceful enough to meaningfully unite people beneath its banner.

This paper examines the seemingly unlikely rapport between the ‘Christian existentialist’, radically Protestant thinker, Søren Kierkegaard and French classicist and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot, famous for advocating a return to the ancient pagan sense of philosophy as a way of life. Despite decisive differences we stress in our concluding remarks, we argue that the conception of philosophy in Hadot as a way of life shares decisive features with Kierkegaard’s understanding of the true ‘religious’ life: as something demanding existential engagement from its proponent, as well as the learning or recitation of accepted doctrines. The mediating figure between the two authors, the paper agrees with Irina, is Socrates and his famous irony. In order to appreciate Kierkegaard’s rapport with Hadot, then we first of all consider Hadot’s treatment of the enigmatic ‘old wise man’ who remains central to Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. However, to highlight Hadot’s Socratic proximity to Kierkegaard, we set up Hadot’s Socrates against the contrasting portrait readers can find in John M. Cooper’s recent work on Socrates and philosophy as a way of life. Part II of the essay turns back from Hadot’s and Kierkegaard’s Socrates towards Hadot’s own work, and argues—again moving beyond both Gregor and Irina’s works on Hadot and Kierkegaard—that the shape of Hadot’s ‘authorship’, including his remarkably classical style, can be understood by way of Kierkegaard’s notion of indirect communication. In our concluding remarks, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, we pinpoint the fundamental difference between the two thinkers, arguing that for Hadot in contrast to Kierkegaard, a stress on existential commitment in no way speaks against the philosophical defence of a form of rational universalism. Reading Hadot via Kierkegaard allows us to appreciate Hadot’s novelty as attempting to ‘squaring the circle’ between an emphasis on subjectivity and, as it were, the subjective dimensions of philosophers’ pursuit of rational universality.

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the state of the literature surrounding Heidegger and Nazism today. Part 1 focusses on Hassan Givsan’s remarkable work, Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”, which looks at the different, mutually inconsistent forms of “apologetics” denying that Heidegger had been a Nazi, or that this commitment could have been shaped by his philosophy. Part 2 looks at five themes that emerge from the 2014 French-language collection Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, la race, edited by Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger’s anti-semitism, before and in the Black Notebooks; Sein und Zeit and “the political”; Heidegger and his estate’s post-war “rewriting” of his Nazi-era texts; Heidegger’s esotericism; and his intellectual proximities to other Nazi thinkers. Closing reflections touch on the state of the debate, calling for increased scholarly awareness of the evidence, and debate of its significance.

Political philosopher Leo Strauss’s extensive engagements with Aristophanes’s comedies represent a remarkable perspective in debates concerning the political and wider meaning of Aristophanes’s plays. Yet they have attracted nearly no critical response. This paper argues that for Strauss, Aristophanes was a very serious, philosophically-minded author who wrote esoterically, using the comic form to convey his conception of man, and his answer to the Socraticquestion of the best form of life. Part I addresses Strauss’s central reading of the Clouds, which positions this play as Aristophanes’s powerful, exoteric criticism of any purely theoretical philosophy that feels no need to explain or accommodate its pursuit to political life. Part II looks at Strauss’s remarkable reading of the Platonic Aristophanes’s central speech in the Symposium, which suggests that Aristophanes was a secret friend and admirer of philosophy conceived in the Platonic manner, as an erotic search for the truth of nature, beneath Aristophanes’s religiously pious and culturally conservative veneer. Indeed, Part III of the paper shows that Strauss’s readings of the Birds, Peace and Wasps indicate that Strauss believed that Aristophanes was such an esoteric friend to the philosophy he had lampooned in the Clouds

This paper responds critically to Ronald Srigley’s groundbreaking 2011 study Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity. Srigley’s book reasserts Camus’ credentials as a deeply serious thinker, whose literary and philosophical oeuvre was dedicated to rethinking modernity on the basis of critical reassessments of the West’s entire premodern heritage. Yet we challenge whether Camus was ever, even in his final writings, so uncompromisingly anti-modern as Srigley contends. Srigley’s attempt to present Camus as committed to a return to the Greeks, on the basis of a total critique of modernity as deleteriously post-Christian, forces him to occlude important distinctions in Camus’ thought: those between unity and totality, rebellion and revolution. By contrast, we compare Camus’ defence of modern rebellion with Blumenberg’s argument in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: finding justification for this rebellion in the deep problem faced by Christian theology of resolving the ‘problem of evil’. Finally, we suggest that Srigley overplays the extent of Camus’ ‘Hellenic’ critique of the Christian heritage, in contrast to Christian theodicy and eschatology, which serve to rationalize avoidable suffering.

This essay is a critique of Derrida's ethical works, using Camus's last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida's: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting passer-by as a young woman suicides one night on the Seine. After this time, he comes to consider all his former virtues as concealed vices. He also becomes acutely aware of what he terms the 'duplicity' of human beings as such. In Part I, I consider how Clamence's fall from innocence can be read 'with' Derrida's deconstructive registration of a 'double bind' pertaining to our standing vis-á-vis what he terms 'logocentrism'. I argue that Derrida's is a post-lapsarian philosophy, which challenges all attempts to construct closed conceptual systems that would confer an epistemic and/or moral certitude upon their expositors. In Part II, I then enter into a more detailed exposition of Derrida's 'later' works broaching friendship, the invitation, the gift, and other 'matters moral'. I read these texts in the light of an examination of what is involved, for Camus, in being a 'judge-penitent' (what Clamence in The Fall calls his profession). I suggest that Derrida runs the risk of a certain 'puritanism of difference' in his moral reflections, which defend the aporetic formulation: 'tout autre est tout autre' [every other is every bit other] (The Gift of Death). The problem is that, while Derrida's position allows one (everywhere) to say what one is against, it problematizes any affirmative moral stance. Like Clamence, who assumes the right to judge everyone else because he has subjected himself to a severe penitence, I suggest that we have a right to wonder whether Derrida's deconstructive critique of metaphysics can validate only endless repetitions of itself. Key Words: Camus • Derrida • ethics • The Fall • innocence • 'puritanism of difference.

This paper examines the central criticisms that come, broadly, from the modern, ‘analytic’ tradition, of Pierre Hadot’s idea of ancient philosophy as a way of life.: Firstly, ancient philosophy just did not or could not have involved anything like the ‘spiritual practices’ or ‘technologies of the self’, aiming at curing subjects’ unnecessary desires or bettering their lives, contra Hadot and Foucault et al. Secondly, any such metaphilosophical account of putative ‘philosophy’ must unacceptably downplay the role of ‘serious philosophical reasoning’ or ‘rigorous argument’ in philosophy. Thirdly, claims that ancient philosophy aimed at securing wisdom by a variety of means including but not restricted to rational inquiry are accordingly false also as historical claims about the ancient philosophers. Fourthly, to the extent that we must (despite (3)) admit that some ancient thinkers did engage in or recommend extra-cognitive forms of transformative practice, these thinkers were not true or ‘mainline’ philosophers. I contend that the historical claims (3) and (4) are highly contestable, risking erroneously projecting a later modern conception of philosophy back onto the past. Of the theoretical or metaphilosophical claims (1) and (2), I argue that the second claim, as framed here, points to real, hard questions that surround the conception(s) of philosophy as a way of life.

Albert Camus repeatedly denied the label “existentialist,” and pointed to his formative experiences of natural beauty and his early introduction to classical Greek thought and culture as determinative of his philosophy. Pierre Hadot, famous for his post-1970 work on philosophy as a way of life in classical antiquity, continued throughout his life to work on the history of Western conceptions of nature. In Le voile d’Isis, Hadot excavated a second strain of Western attitudes towards nature, alongside the instrumental or “Promethean” approach dominant in modernity: this is that of the contemplative Orphic perspective, closely tied in antiquity to philosophical regimens of spiritual exercises to transform philosophers’ ways of seeing. This paper will argue that Camus and Hadot should be read as two twentieth century “Orphic” figures in this sense, in a way that at once singles them out against almost all other European contemporaries, as well as speaking to our ecological concerns today. Yet the only comparative piece on the two thinkers to date, by Matthew Lamb, misses this shared contemplative, Orphic core to their positions. This paper aims to redress this shortcoming in the reception of the two figures.

ABSTRACT This review essay responds critically to the English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s monumental Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel. It sets out to clearly identify and examine Losurdo’s two tasks in Nietzsche: firstly, his reconstruction of Nietzsche’s intellectual itinerary, from his earliest works until his descent into madness, in the context of later nineteenth-century social, political, philosophical, and eugenic sources; and secondly, to “interpret the interpretations”, and understand how Nietzsche’s avowed “aristocratic radicalism” could have informed thinkers from across the political spectrum, at the same time as Losurdo contests the cogency of “progressive” readings of Nietzsche as based upon a selective “hermeneutics of innocence” which involves suppressing the recurrent, darker registers of his texts. The essay also unpacks Losurdo’s two hermeneutic strategies in this magnum opus. Firstly, we examine his “unifying” claim that Nietzsche, as a great thinker, had a coherent but evolving vision, from Birth of Tragedy through to his final works, unified by his metapolitical intention to overcome democratic, liberal and socialist modern egalitarianisms, by tracking them back to their roots in the Old Testament and classical antiquity. Secondly, we critique his contextualizing methodology which resituates the author of the “untimely meditations” within the debates of his day concerning modernity, slavery, liberalism, socialism, massification, Darwinism, and eugenics. To close, I proffer some brief comments concerning the significance of Losurdo’s work in the present moment, as the Far Right globally reasserts itself.

In an ironically Žižekian manner, this paper argues that Simon Critchley and Slavoj Žižek's apparent political disagreement (ludic reformist versus strident revolutionary) conceal a common set of preconditions and presuppositions. These presuppositions can be summed by the slogan “the forgetting of political philosophy”, which more specifically means the forgetting of the difference between philosophy and political life, and the reflective need to find mediations between the two. Critchley's turn to humour honours the notion that politics is about the realm of appearances, while Žižek's frank avowal of the “diabolical evil” of the subject of the death drive makes patently clear the dangers posed by a “politics of Truth”.

Is the Stoic sage a possible or desirable ideal for contemporary men and women, as we enter into difficult times? Is he, as Seneca presents him, the very best person for a crisis? In order to examine these questions, Part 1 begins from what Irene Liu calls the “standard” modern conceptions of the sage as either a kind of epistemically perfect, omniscient agent, or else someone in possession of a specific arsenal of theoretical knowledge, especially concerning the physical world. We contest this contentious conception of the sage for being inconsistent with the Stoic conceptions of wisdom, the technai and knowledge which can be gleaned from the doxographic sources. In Part 2, we suggest that the wisdom of the Stoic sage reflects the Stoics’ “dispositional” conception of knowledge, their substantive conception of reason, and their sense of philosophy as above all an “exercise” or askêsis of a craft or technê for living. It is embodied in an ongoing exercise of examining one’s impressions for consistency with what one already knows, looking back to the natural prolêpseis with which all people are equipped. In Part 3, we show how only this account of the wisdom of the sage, at the epistemic level, enables us to understand how, in the non-doxographic texts led by Seneca’s De Constantia Sapientiae, the sage is celebrated above all for his ethical characteristics, and his ability to bear up in a crisis. Concluding reflections return to our framing concern, as to whether philosophy as a way of life, and the ancient ideal of the sage, can speak to us today not only as scholars, but as individuals called upon to live in difficult times. We suggest that they can and should remain sources of orientation, contestation, and inspiration.