Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus by John M. Cooper (review)

This book has two basic aims: to provide a clear and comprehensive account of the most prominent moral philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome, and to explain how for their adherents, these philosophies both motivated and constituted distinctive ways of life.

Cooper succeeds admirably in achieving the first aim: he gives clear and concise accounts of the moral philosophies of Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Pyrrhonists, and the Platonists. Each chapter explores not only the basic theories of the school in question, but also some lingering questions readers may have about those theories’ implications. Cooper aims for his book to be both accessible to readers with little formal training in academic philosophy and engaging for professional philosophers, so he makes frequent use of footnotes for discussion of sources and other background information, and he includes endnotes for discussion of scholarly details. In addition, he provides ten pages of suggestions for further reading.

For readers already familiar with ancient moral philosophy, the most provocative part of the book will be the first chapter, where Cooper outlines his understanding of the ancients’ conception of philosophy as way of life. Cooper presents his book as a response to the work of the late Pierre Hadot, author of Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) and What is Ancient Philosophy? (2002). In these books, Hadot argues that the ancient practice of philosophy as a way of life requires an “existential choice” whereby one commits oneself to a particular school or set of values. Cooper disagrees, arguing that “the only existential option involved is the basic commitment . . . to living on the basis of philosophical reason” (19). Given one’s commitment to following philosophical reason wherever it leads, one’s adherence to the doctrines of a particular school will be based solely upon philosophical reason’s apprehension of “rational arguments in favor of the fundamental principles of the philosophical school in question” (19).

While the basic thrust of Cooper’s argument here is quite clear, the specific formulations he adopts in expressing his position are less so. For instance, Cooper writes that the ancients take their philosophies to be “fully grounded in reason” (14), and uses expressions such as “what reason itself tells us” (x). But he does not explain what exactly these claims and expressions amount to, and thus one worries that they will mislead certain members of his audience and—given the central role that reason plays in Cooper’s objections to Hadot—leave others unsatisfied.

Readers will also likely have questions about how to understand the positions of the various schools in relation to each other. Cooper argues that Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Platonists believe that they each “have arguments that establish once and for all just what the good is, and what it requires of us in the organization and living of our lives” (64), while Socrates and the Pyrrhonists declare themselves unable (at present, anyway) to achieve comprehensive and certain knowledge about the nature of the good. While Cooper understates the force of Pyrrhonian skepticism—there is no discussion of the Pyrrhonists’ most powerful arguments against the possibility of knowledge, the Five Modes of Agrippa—he does offer a number of Socrates’s reasons for suspecting that humans are incapable of ever achieving such complete and definitive knowledge of the good (48–49). Thus, we are left to wonder what to make of the dogmatists’ supposed belief that philosophical reason can provide them with this knowledge. Were Socrates and the Pyrrhonists intellectually outmatched by these other philosophers? Or were these others insufficiently self-critical?

Unfortunately, Cooper does not discuss these questions, and given his interpretation of ancient philosophy, it is difficult to see how to answer them without charging the dogmatists with the gravest of philosophical sins: a lack of self-knowledge. Consequently, one is left to wonder whether Hadot was not on...