Conversations in Philosophy

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’. In the final episode of their series, Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Read more in the LRB: Jacqueline Rose: Where's Woolf? https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf1 Virgina Woolf: The Symbol https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf2 John Bayley: Superchild https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf3

Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a profound personal crisis. The self-described ‘judge-penitent’ had once thought himself to be morally irreproachable, but an encounter with a woman on a bridge and a mysterious laugh left him tormented by a sense of hypocrisy. In this episode, Jonathan and James follow Camus’s slippery hero as he tries and fails to undergo a moral revolution, and look at the ways in which the novel’s lightness of style allows for twisted inversions of conventional morality. They also consider the similarities between Camus’s novels and those of Simone de Beauvoir, and his fractious relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Jeremy Harding: Algeria's Camus: ⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus1⁠ Jacqueline Rose: 'The Plague': ⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus3⁠ Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World: ⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus2⁠ Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠

What is an emotion? In his 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on human emotion and its relation to consciousness. For Sartre, the emotions are not external forces acting upon consciousness but an action of consciousness as it tries to rearrange the world to suit itself, or as he puts it at the end of his book: a sudden fall of consciousness into magic. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss why Sartre’s rejection of the idea of the subconscious is not as much a departure from Freud’s theories as he thought they were, and the ways in which his attempt to establish a ‘phenomenological psychology’ manifested in other works, including Nausea, Being and Nothingness and The Words. Note: Readers should use the translation by Philip Mairet. The earlier one by Bernard Frechtman, as Jonathan explains in the episode, contains numerous (often amusing) errors. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Jonathan Rée on 'Being and Nothingness': ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre1⁠ Sissela Bok on Sartre's life: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre2⁠ Edwards Said's encounter with Sartre: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre3⁠ Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally delivered as a lecture and intended not so much as a defence of religion as an attack on anti-religion. James’s target was the ‘rugged and manly school of science’ and the kind of atheism ‘that goes around thumping its chest offering its biceps to be felt’. In this episode Jonathan Rée and James Wood look at the intellectual environment William James was working in, and against, in the second half of the 19th century, and its parallels in the ‘new atheism’ of today. They also discuss the extraordinary upbringing William (and his novelist brother Henry) received and the advice he offered to anyone contemplating suicide in his essay ‘Is life worth living?’ Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Read more in the LRB: Helen Thaventhiran: William James's Prescriptions https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/helen-thaventhiran/no-dose-for-it-at-the-chemist Michael Wood: William James and modernism https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n18/michael-wood/understanding-forwards Richard Poirier: Williams James's pragmatism https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n19/richard-poirier/copying-the-coyote LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠⁠

T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where his only obligation was not to get married. Yet in over fifty years of slow, meticulous writing he articulated a series of unusual and arresting ideas that attacked Kantian and utilitarian notions of duty and morality. In this episode, Jonathan and James look at Bradley’s polemic against John Stuart Mill, ‘My Station and Its Duties’, and other essays in Ethical Studies, which challenge the idea of morality as a product of calm reasoning arrived at by mature, rational minds. For Bradley, morality is a characteristic of communities, determined by people’s differing needs at various stages in their lives, and the universal need for self-realisation can only be achieved through those communities. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Read more in the LRB: Frank Kermode on Eliot and Bradley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n17/frank-kermode/feast-of-st-thomas LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which individuals are bounded by self-created horizons, and the extent to which this fits with Transcendentalist notions of progress and independence. They also discuss what his other essays, including ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘Art’ and ‘Nature’, have to say about the importance of thinking one’s own thoughts, and why Emerson had such a powerful influence on writers as varied as Nietzsche, Saul Bellow and Louisa May Alcott. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Read 'Circles' here: ⁠https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/circles/⁠ Read more in the LRB: Tony Tanner on the life of Emerson: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n10/tony-tanner/arctic-habits⁠ Colin Burrow on the American canon: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n22/colin-burrow/the-magic-bloomschtick⁠ LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠

The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling appeared under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, and its playful relationship to the reader doesn’t stop there. Described as a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the title page, the book works through a variety of formats in its attempt to understand the nature of faith and the apparently unsolvable paradox that the father of the Abrahamic religions was prepared to murder his own son. James and Jonathan consider whether Kierkegaard thinks we can understand anything, and what Fear and Trembling has in common with the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Jonathan Rée: Dancing in the Service of Thought ⁠https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard1⁠ James Butler: Reading Genesis ⁠https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard2⁠ Roger Poole: A Walk with Kierkegaard ⁠https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard3⁠ Terry Eagleton: A Long Way from Galilee ⁠https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard4⁠ James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a contributor to the London Review of Books. His books include How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self. Jonathan Rée is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and a freelance writer and philosopher. His most recent book on philosophy is Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English. LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠