In this chapter, I examine Moses Maimonides’ conception of worship, concentrating on two questions: (1) On what grounds is a being worthy of worship? and (2) How is worship enacted? Concerning (1), I begin with Maimonides’ objects of false worship, aka idolatry, which are not only material but paradigmatically the intellects that were taken to be the ultimate causes of change in the world. Indeed thinking of God Himself as an intellect is the height of anthropomorphism and idolatry for Maimonides. Instead, the deity is worship-worthy as the unknowable necessarily existent being in virtue of itself on which the existence of everything else is causally dependent. Our attitude of radical contingency on this being is the ultimate grounds for His worship. Addressing (2), I argue that what enacts Maimonidean worship are not bodily acts but totally devoted, constant intellectual activities to achieve the humanly possible understanding of God and the natural world. Worship is not distinct from intellectual activity but a manner of engaging in it – worshippingly – and a way of life that embraces everything the worshipper does. Finally, I argue that idolatrous or false worship really consists in activities of the mind directed toward the wrong beings on which we are not contingent – and specifically ourselves and our own intellects.

Plato’s Gorgias is often framed as a quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, conceived as two ways of life. I suggest a refinement of the traditional framing: the dialogue requires discernment rather than choice. The reader must distinguish the real life from the illusory alternative, a task whose difficulty Plato intensifies by bringing to the fore the striking resemblances between rhetoric and philosophy. These resemblances lead to the realization that each side has a story about how it is the genuine article. Further, from a neutral vantage point, the dialogue leaves the two possibilities identically placed. In doing so, the Gorgias expresses a sense of the limitations of argument shorn of commitment to guiding normative principles. But Plato’s text also suggests the possibility of progress if, like Socrates, one is willing to stake one’s engagement on the presence of similar antecedent commitments within one’s interlocutor, however deeply rooted.

Populism entails a unique claim for recognition, which sets it at odds with the democratic ideal of respect for the equal standing of every citizen. This claim arises from a totalizing framing of political conflict, according to which one can and should understand one uniform group in society as the worst-off group for all political purposes. The populist claim for recognition is an exclusionary claim: We are something that you are not, “the people.” In contrast, this chapter argues that in order to show equal respect for everyone, as well as solidaristic concern for diverse marginalized groups, it is imperative to focus on particular struggles for recognition and discuss who actually suffers the greatest injustice in each case separately. The chapter goes on to contrast the populist claim for recognition and its illiberalism with the kind of respect, which Joel Feinberg argues is expressed in and through “the activity of claim-making” characteristic of a society with rights. Adopting a participant attitude and seeing rights claims as an intersubjective activity, we can better appreciate how rights contribute to democratic respect.

Building on Pierre Hadot’s influential reminder that thinkers in the ancient world used to practice philosophy as a total way of life, they show that Nietzsche was inspired by these precursors to craft TSZ as a narrative exemplification and personification of this ideal. In their view, Nietzsche presents his performative book as a crucial intervention in an age when professionalized philosophy has become a merely theoretical and contemplative exercise that is textually propagated by university-dwelling scholarly specialists who have little interest in the kind of commitment to knowledge and wisdom that would transform them and their lives. Nietzsche knew that the philosophical texts he wrote in his own voice could be easily assimilated into this bloodless academic culture, so he deliberately designed a new kind of philosophical text that would resist any such assimilation. Instead of just arguing that philosophy should be practiced as a way of life, Nietzsche writes a new kind of philosophy book that dramatically models this practice and hopes to provoke a radical spiritual conversion in its readers.