The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

"Hadot's refreshing efforts to free philosophy and its history from the sterile constraints of abstract theorizing and academic specialization find a lively and productive outlet in the interviews collected here. Introduced by Jeannie Carlier, a French scholar of Neo-platonic religious thought and friend of Hadot, and conducted in turns by Carlier and Arnold Davidson, the American philosopher and intellectual historian most responsible for the introduction and dissemination of Hadot's work in English-speaking contexts, these conversations explore in depth and varied detail both the personal and the intellectual development of a scholar whose own work insists above all that the personal or existential cannot rightly or fruitfully be separated from the intellectual or philosophical. Enacting the kind of dialogue that Hadot believes essential to any philosophy that would constitute a living relation between persons rather than an abstract relation to ideas, these interviews could not find a more suitable subject." -- Thomas A. Carlson, University of California "There is much here that could affirm and inform a philosophical counseling practice, both in attitude and content. There is much here to remind ourselves of the importance of spiritual or philosophical exercises in our own trying times." -- Helen Douglas * Philosophical Practice * "If your own experience of 'Philosophy 101' way back when was just shy of miserable, disconnected from the daily or generally incoherent-gridlocked, for instance, in self-serving terms-here, in The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Cartier and Arnold I. Davidson, a good-souled man-Hadot himself-winks. He seems to say, 'Here's what happened, and here's why philosophy really is for you.' And if you are a teacher or a pedagogue, it's for you all the more." -- Teachers College Record

In this book of brilliantly erudite and precise discussions, which also serves as an introduction to Pierre Hadot's more scholarly works, Hadot explains that for the Ancients, philosophy was not reducible to the building of a theoretical system: it was above all a choice about how to live one's life.