"As a way of life, Cottingham’s philosophy of religion aims for the long view. In his own words, “The ‘conversion’ at which spiritual practices have traditionally been aimed is not conceived of as something that can be completed on a particular day, or even over a single season, but is thought of as a lifelong process.”49 Cottingham lists among these practices activities like prayer, fasting, and meditation, all engaged in with “the goal of achieving a vision of reality that would lead to self-understanding and selftransformation.”50 As with many other instances of askēsis I have described, the practices Cottingham concerns himself with include acts of privation (e.g., fasting), but ultimately go beyond them. Askēsis is as much an additive enterprise as it is a subtractive one. “The central notion of askēsis, found for example in Epictetus,” Cottingham writes, “implied not so much ‘asceticism’ in the modern sense as a practical programme of training, concerned with the ‘art of living.’”51 This practical programme of training is precisely what Cottingham finds missing from the modern curriculum of philosophy. Michel Foucault makes a similar point when he diagnosis a certain “Cartesian moment” in the history of philosophy wherein the transformations of the self underwritten by askēsis are replaced by the simpler and more universal requirements of the twin acquisition of knowledge and evidence.52 Foucault’s argument is that there is a point in modern philosophy, marked by Descartes, where acquiring knowledge without the need of a corresponding transformation of the self comes to prominence, a point where evidence replaces askēsis as the primary object of knowledge. At this stage, according to Foucault, “the history of truth enters its modern period” and truth becomes associated with knowledge (connaissance, in the French), rather than with the efforts of a practicing subject.53 This moment marks a shift in definitions of truth understood as practice (askēsis), or as the “return effect” of truth encounters, and towards truth understood as proposition (mathemata).54 In other words, the askēsis long required of the person who wants to know is on this view replaced with a subject who can merely acquire knowledge without needing to make any effort to transform themselves, either in the direction of the good or in any other way".

Robbert