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.

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