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.

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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 built in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts.