Abstract

Pierre Hadot has declared his debt to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose views on language games and forms of life have inspired the idea that philosophy can be understood as a set of spiritual exercises designed to change one’s way of life. Despite the heuristic and hermeneutic centrality attribuited to the theory of Sprachspiele, however, Hadot does not explicitly refers to it in his writings on ancient philosophy. Following Hadot’s suggestion, the purpose of this article is to apply Wittgenstein’s views regarding language games and forms of life to two relevant issues: the problem of continuity and discontinuity in the history of spiritual exercises, and the variety of Marcus Aurelius’s exercises on the use of ordinary linguistic expressions