Ancient Way Of Philosophising

Georginna Anne Hinnebusch, A Philosophy to Live by: Goethe's Art of Living in the Spirit of the Ancients, (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), Intro., p. 1: 

For the ancients, a man was deemed a philosopher by virtue of electing to lead a life conforming to specific values daily exhibited in his ordinary conduct. The mark of a philosophical pedigree was not the espousal of a particular mode of thinking but the evincement of an exemplary way of being. That this characterization of living rather than thinking philosophically has become obsolete, proving alien to prevailing intuitions about the philosopher's defining features, attests to modernity's fateful partitioning of thinker and liver into two mutually exclusive forms of life. The tendency to confine inquiry about a philosopher almost exclusively to his mode of thought, whether through his extant works, his exegesis of authoritative texts, or the re-appropriation of his methods by later philosophical movements, is symptomatic of the marginalization of the ancient conception of philosophy as a fundamental way of life in which the philosopher's lived existence rather than his written works served as an ideal standard for emulation.