CultureLab • Permanent Seminar

Simone D’Agostino

'The art that makes us free'. Hadot’s discovery of philosophy as a way of life in Montaigne’s Essays

In this lecture I would like to present the first part of Pierre Hadod’s life-long dealing with Montaigne’s Essays, from his first contact as a young student in 1936, to his work on Epistrophe and Metanoia in 1953. The Essays result to be one of the primary and principal sources for Hadot’s insight into philosophy as a way of life, taken from diverse perspectives: ‘education’ or formation of the mind, ‘wisdom’ or medicine of the mind, ‘simplicity’ or the mind’s return to (its own) nature.


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BIO
Simone D’Agostino is full professor of History of early-modern philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome. Among the books he published are the works on early-modern philosophy, Sistemi filosofici moderni: Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume (Pisa: ETS, 2013) and Esercizi spirituali e filosofia moderna: Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza (Pisa: ETS, 2017; english translation forthcoming). The central topic of his current research is philosophy as a way of life in early-modern time.