Conversations in Philosophy

'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

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 h

'The Sovereignty of Good' by Iris Murdoch

Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clear

'The Fall' by Albert Camus

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 strange

'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir

At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can

'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre

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 t

'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from thei

'The Will to Believe' by William James

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 Wil

'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche

For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who

'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley

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 remarka

'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill

Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time

'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 f

'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach

In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the

'Fear and Trembling' by Søren Kierkegaard

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

Introducing 'Conversations in Philosophy'

James Wood and Jonathan Rée introduce their new Close Readings series, Conversations in Philosophy, running throughout 2025. They explain the title of the series and why