Philosophy and Life Writing

In this volume, scholars from a number of academic disciplines illuminate how a range of philosophers and other thoughtful individuals addressed the complex issues surrounding philosophy and life writing. The contributors interrogate the writings of Teresa of Avila, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Dilthey, Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Bryan Magee, Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Judith Butler, who range in time from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. As this volume demonstrates, the relationship between philosophy and life writing has become an issue of urgent interdisciplinary concern. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

D. L. LeMahieu is the Hotchkiss Presidential Professor of History at Lake Forest College, USA. His work includes The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher and his Age (1976) and A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind (1988). Christopher Cowley is Associate Professor at the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland. His work includes Moral Responsibility (author, 2013), Supererogation (editor, 2015), and The Philosophy of Autobiography (editor, 2015).

Introduction - Philosophy and Life Writing 1. Self-management and Narrativity in Teresa of Avila's Work 2. 'S'éclairer en dedans': Rousseau and the Autobiographical Construction of Truth 3. The Incubus of Necessity in Mill's Autobiography 4. Wilhelm Dilthey's Views on Autobiography 5. Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um 1900: Longing, Enchantment and the Material Subject 6. 'Forgive Me Reader, for I Have Sinned': Disponibilité and Confession in the Works of Albert Camus 7. Life Writing and Philosophy: Bryan Magee and the Subjectivities of the Examined Life 8. Heterobiography: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Autobiographical Writing 9. Narrative and the Phenomenology of Personal Identity in Merleau-Ponty 10. Narrating Trauma: Judith Butler on Narrative Coherence and the Politics of Self-Narration Book Review: The Philosophy of Autobiography, edited by Christopher Cowley