John Sellars. The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003 [Book review]

It might be inferred, in either a receptive or a suspicious spirit, that the main title of John Sellars’ book suggests an intention to provide the companion-piece to Alexander Nehamas’ hugely popular Sather lectures, of the same name, on the figure of Socrates. Or again, an installation of the kind of programmatic research in ‘technologies of the self’ proposed, at the beginning of the 1980s, by Michel Foucault. In fact, Sellars makes no immodest claims to intellectual patronage; he does share, however, with Nehamas the intention of turning to philosophy’s classical heritage in order to widen and deepen contemporary perceptions of the discipline. As he summarises in the book’s opening and closing pages, the ‘technical conception of philosophy’ which he argues on behalf of Stoicism would not be simply an antiquarian relic, a naïf primitif, but the marrow of a counter-tradition taking in the humanisms of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Sellars is the author of the entry on Neostoicism in the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy), up to the works of Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze.