The Philosophy of Solitude

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophy of solitude. The state of being alone can arise for many different reasons: imprisonment, exile or personal choice. It can be prompted by religious belief, personal necessity or a philosophical need for solitary contemplation. Many thinkers have dealt with the subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Hannah Arendt. It’s a philosophical tradition that takes in medieval religious mystics, the work of Montaigne and Adam Smith, and the great American poets of solitude Thoreau and Emerson.

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Guests

• Melissa Lane 11 episodes
  Professor of Politics at Princeton University
• Simon Blackburn 4 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at the New College of the Humanities and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
• John Haldane 8 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews

Reading list

• Confessions
  St Augustine (Penguin, 2002) Google Books →
• The Consolation of Philosophy
  Boethius (Penguin, 1999) Google Books →
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
  Susan Cain (Broadway Books, 2013) Google Books →
• Exile and the Kingdom
  Albert Camus (trans. Carol Cosman) (Penguin, 2006) Google Books →
• Robinson Crusoe
  Daniel Defoe (ed. John Richetti) (Penguin, 2003) Google Books →
• Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter
  Philip Koch (Open Court Publishing Company, 1994) Google Books →
• Into the Wild
  Jon Krakauer (Villard Books, 1996) Google Books →
• The Practice of the Presence of God
  Brother Lawrence (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010) Google Books →
• The Complete Essays
  Michel de Montaigne (trans. M.A. Screech) (Penguin, 2013) Google Books →
• Solitude: A Return to the Self
  Anthony Storr (Free Press, 1988) Google Books →
• Walden
  Henry David Thoreau (ed. J. Lyndon Shanley) (Princeton University Press, 2004) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b046ntnz

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b046ntnz

Auto-category: 128 (Humankind)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1845, the American writer Henry David Thoreau moved into a small log cabin he had built in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts.