All posts tagged: Montaigne

Discoveries: Sarah Bakewell on Irmgard Keun

Published by podmeister

I interviewed Sarah Bakewell last month about her biography of Montaigne for the new Interview of the Month slot on the Blackwell Online website (that interview will be available there very soon). Visiting her website recently I saw her post about Irmgard Keun, a writer I had never heard of. It turned out that Sarah had never heard of her either until she stumbled on one of her books in My Back Pages in Balham.  That gave me an idea for a new series of guest posts, featuring readers on writers or books they have recently discovered.  Sarah has very kindly allowed me to republish her post, the first in a series of what I am unsurprisingly going to call Discoveries. If you would like to contribute, email me at george [at] podularity.com. When I’m working from home there usually comes a point where I have to get up from my desk and rush out into the air, usually on the pretext of going to the supermarket or post office. But sometimes, once I get …

17. “Unstitching the carefully tailored suit” – among the dead philosophers

Published by podmeister

“The book is written against the view that a philosopher’s biography is of no importance and that philosophy can be reduced to a series of systems of thought. It’s really an attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers. That was the way that philosophy was taught until the eighteenth century. So in a way it’s a revival of a rather ancient idea of philosophy being taught through exemplary biography or the idea of philosophy as a way of life.” In this week’s podcast I talk to Simon Critchley about his recently published Book of Dead Philosophers. The book might at first seem like one of those forgettable book of quirky lists and miscellaneous bizzareries, but in fact it’s much more than that. As Jonathan Derbyshire put it in his Guardian review: “These descriptions aren’t just intended to be diverting, however (though they are certainly that); Critchley says that they are also meant to challenge a conception of philosophy which holds that it is a form of abstract, conceptual inquiry that …