© 2020 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd © 2020 Metaphilosophy LLC and John Wiley & Sons Ltd METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 51, Nos. 2–3, April 2020 0026-1068 PHILOSOPHY AS EMPIRICAL EXPLORATION OF LIVING AN APPROACH TO COURSES IN PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE STEVEN HORST Abstract: This essay describes an approach to designing a course in philosophy as a way of life (PWOL) around a set of immersive “spiritual exercises” through which students might examine their desires, engaging students in a process of testing their own experience against philosophical theories and theories against their own experience. These are used to tie together the units of a course covering classical Western and Eastern philosophical traditions, and to supplement tradi- tional philosophical analysis of texts and arguments with ways of exploring what it might be like to live as a Platonist, Stoic, or Confucian. The essay details several exercises, engages perspectives on PWOL from Pierre Hadot and John Cooper, and addresses the question of how to assess immersive exercises. Keywords: assessment, John Cooper, cultivation, desire, Pierre Hadot, immersive assignments, moral education, moral psychology, pedagogy, philosophy as a way of life, PWOL, self-understanding, spiritual exercises, teaching philosophy. When Pierre Hadot wrote his landmark book Philosophy as a Way of Life (Hadot 1995), he would probably have been surprised if anyone had sug- gested that there would eventually be a movement of philosophers devel- oping college courses exploring philosophical ways of life, some of them integrating what he called “spiritual exercises.” Indeed, organizers of re- cent summer institutes exploring such courses were themselves surprised by the number of applicants, some of them people who were already teaching such courses and others who were intrigued by the idea and wanted to learn more about how to begin teaching them. 1 I have been teaching such courses for several years now, and courses involving immer- sive exercises for much longer. In this essay, I wish to share my experience 1 Wesleyan University hosted an NEH Summer Institute entitled “Reviving Philosophy as a Way of Life” in 2018. http://nehwayoflife.com. In 2019, the University of Notre Dame hosted the first of a three-year program of summer institutes funded by the Mellon Foundation. https://philife.nd.edu.