N.2/2025 L'eredità di Pierre Hadot. Per una filosofia come modo di vivere

Pierre Hadot e la biografia spirituale di Plotino

Domenico Vitali

Published in June, 2026

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Pierre Hadot and the spiritual biography of Plotinus

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to analyze Pierre Hadot’s work primarily devoted to Plotinus, Plotin ou la simplicité du regard, in order to account for the way in which the author examines the biography of the Neoplatonic philosopher – drawing extensively from Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus – in terms of what his student Arnold I. Davidson calls a “spiritual biography.” The aim is to let the few available pieces of information about Plotinus’s life, recounted by his disciple, emerge as indices of his very own philosophical doctrine, within a perspective that conceives the thought of the ancient and late-ancient world not as an accumulation of abstract doctrines, but rather as a true choice of life, whose strength lies in the concrete applicability of the fundamental precepts of the various philosophical schools.