Ray Billington always gave us a memorably lively account of philosophers. Not just what they wrote, but their character, and how they lived. Should we be interested in philosophers’ biographies? Is a philosopher’s life worth exploring? Do the human, all too human, things that happened to them, give us an insight into their work, or are they irrelevant trivia?
We will look at three very well known intimate relationships involving philosophers (Heidegger/Arendt, Nietzsche/Lou Salome, Kierkegaard/Regine Olsen). Much scholarly ink has been spent on each of these, some writers perhaps indulging in an excess of amateur psycho-analysis. What do we learn about the character of these people which helps us understand their writings?
We will look at a niche form of writing: philosophical biography, as carried out in the work of Ray Monk. Monk is an academic philosopher who has written two ambitious philosophical biographies (Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius) and a two part study of Bertrand Russell (The Spirit of Solitude, The Ghost of Madness). These are absorbing reads, and I will argue, are valuable to understanding what motivated their work.