Philosophers once preached what they practiced. Socrates, Diogenes the Cynic, Epicurus, and the Stoics not only devoted themselves to living simple, abstemious lives; it was the essence of their philosophy. Some of the most important modern philosophers—Spinoza, Kant, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein—maintained the tradition of a spare, detached, often solitary way of life, but by now it has largely been lost, along with its importance. Most philosophers today are frazzled, multitasking academics, and they don’t write about simplicity, they write about “Quantifier Variance and Ontological Deflationism” or “Modally Plenitudinous Endurantism.”

These memorable phrases, reproduced by Emrys Westacott in the introduction to his book, The Wisdom of Frugality, are the titles of papers presented at a recent meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Westacott, a professional philosopher himself (he teaches at Alfred University), has committed the heresy of writing a lucid, accessible book with an immediate bearing on people’s everyday lives. But it’s not primarily an attempt to retrieve the ancient philosophical art of living (and writing) simply. It’s an attempt to evaluate that tradition, and its contemporary echoes and amendments, at a time when life has arguably never been so complicated, distracted, and encumbered. Unlike the ancient Greek philosophers, contemporary Americans inhabit a time and place in which it is easier to be fat than thin and more common to have too much stuff than too little.