What is really ancient philosophy ? (book review)

Forget everything you know about ancient philosophy: it is neither the discipline of logical reasoning (logos) as opposed to mythical discourse (mythos); nor the love of wisdom in the most rational sense of the word; nor a way of life accompanied by reasonable discourse. On the contrary, in his essay Ancient Philosophy (La philosophie antique), the historian Pierre Vesperini shows that these academic conceptions and commonplaces do not really correspond to historical reality.

The history of ancient philosophy that the author proposes to make is a truly historical one. Instead of presenting in a systematic way the ideas and doctrines of the main philosophers of Antiquity (which is what the philosophical histories of ancient philosophy do), Pierre Vesperini explains that “the point here is to try to reconstruct the different experiences that were called ‘philosophizing’ in Antiquity” (p.11).

Author’s methodology

How does the author reconstruct these experiences? First of all, he does not limit himself to the texts of authors considered to be philosophers and relies on a very wide range of documents and resources: “it is often in the most unexpected sources — fragments of melodic poetry, old chronicles, inscriptions, etc. — that the historian can find the most decisive evidence, the most necessary…