Still, while Examined Lives succeeds as a historical resource, there's a nagging sense of unrealized potential here. Miller concludes with a disappointingly ambivalent sell of philosophy as a way of life. Although he insists this ancient notion is still a "real alternative" to faith-based religion and the dry academicism of scientific reason, there's no cogent attempt to define what this "alternative" actually is. Miller weakens his own project when he admits that today we "lack the specific spiritual resources and cultural contexts" to adequately follow these philosophers' examples. Considering that these individual quests for enlightenment often led to persecution, madness, and relatively short existences, what can we really learn from, say, Plato's supposed cause of death (lice infestation)? More relevant connections to 21st-century culture could have allowed Examined Lives to have a fuller life of its own—one that might have extended beyond an undergraduate philosophy syllabus.