The Philosophy of Solitude

19 Jun, 2014 120 Epistemology

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.

Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Melissa Lane 10 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

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

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Programme ID: b046ntnz

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

Auto-category: 128 (The Human Condition)

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.