Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek thinker Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic words "Phusis kruptesthai philei." How the aphorism, usually translated as "Nature loves to hide," has haunted Western culture ever since is...

A "magisterial mappa mundi" of the terrain that Pierre Hadot has so productively worked for decades, this ambitious work revises our view of ancient philosophy--and in doing so, proposes that we change the way we see philosophy itself....