In this Book
- Solar Calendar, And Other Ways of Marking Time
- Book
- 2017
- Published by: Punctum Books
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
summary
At the end of his life, Pierre Hadot was a professor at the Collège de France — a “professor’s professor” — and he helped Michel Foucault, most famously, conceptualize ethics. Hadot devoted his career to recovering the ancient conception of philosophy, according to which the discourses of universities are but a fragment of what philosophy is. His engagement with this theme helped Bendik-Keymer understand and develop a personal counter-culture to his academic work, a kind of original academics truer to the idea of the philosophical school Plato first developed in his Ἀκαδήµεια. But while Plato’s school developed a useful form of life, it had an ambivalent relation to democracy and to everyday people. Whereas Plato was in some ways one of the first egalitarians by merit (especially concerning women), he was also deeply classist in his categorization of intellectual potentials. He effectively thought some people were stupid by nature, having no philosophical worth. Hence the Ἀκαδήµεια existed outside the city, in practice exclusive and somewhat sequestered. To some extent, Plato’s vision of philosophy — at least as explained by Hadot — had the practical point of philosophy right, but this point still needed to be rendered thoroughly democratic in the polyphony and multiple intelligences of people. Doing so coheres with what Foucault was after in his application of Hadot. It is also what Bendik-Keymer is after — to extract what is good from original academics and make it democratic, as opposed to dumbing people down.
Table of Contents

- 2. I don't want to be thoughtless
- pp. 41-70
- 3. I was in the open then
- pp. 71-114
- 4. I want to meet you as a person
- pp. 115-148
- 5. I carried my teeth in my heart
- pp. 149-186
- 6. We are a storm in wondrous hunger
- pp. 187-264
- Postscript: The Practice of Ethics
- pp. 265-292
Additional Information
ISBN
9780998531830
MARC Record
OCLC
1182548153
Pages
348
Launched on MUSE
2020-08-06
Language
English
Open Access
Yes
Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-SA
Copyright
2017