Pierre Hadot
Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) was a French philosopher and historian of ancient philosophy — Neoplatonism, Epicureanism and Stoicism — who held the chair of the history of Hellenistic and Roman thought at the Collège de France (1983–1991). His lifelong project, most fully stated in Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (1981, tr. Philosophy as a Way of Life, 1995), is that ancient philosophy was a bios — a lived practice meant to transform the person practicing it — and that treating it as a body of doctrine to be taught, the way modern academic philosophy does, distorts what it originally was. He defines spiritual exercises as practices "intended to effect a modification and a transformation in the subjects who practice them," and was among the first in France to take up the later Wittgenstein; his analysis influenced Foucault's late volumes of the History of Sexuality. Source: Wikipedia (T2, tertiary).
Hadot and Stoicism
post-modern-stoics-thecollector (TheCollector, T4) presents "Stoicism as a way of life" as Hadot's defining project and pairs him with Foucault as the two scholars of spiritual exercises — techniques of the self meant to produce a lived experience rather than assent to a theory. Where the other five thinkers in this ingest build new philosophy out of Stoic material, the article treats Hadot differently: as the historian whose readings the others (Foucault directly, Deleuze partly) leaned on to get at Stoic practice in the first place. His debt to the later Wittgenstein's language-games is named as the source of his own comparison. The article also credits Stoicism as a major influence on modern cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and treats Hadot's account of ancient practice as the clearest statement of why. Quoted in the piece: "For us, nature's final accomplishment is contemplation, becoming aware, and a way of living in harmony with nature."
In the conversation
Hadot supplies the spoke's link between ancient Stoic practice and its 20th-century uptake: Foucault's "technologies of the self" and care of the self already on this spoke's Foucault page are the same object Hadot spent a career describing from the historian's side rather than the philosopher's. He is also the article's route to psychology-wiki's territory: the CBT connection is a claim about a modern clinical practice, which that spoke, not this one, would need to verify empirically.
Related
stoicism · michel-foucault · gilles-deleuze · post-modern-stoics-thecollector