Philosophy and Autobiography

‘In this absorbing book Christopher Hamilton brings together themes including the importance of a personal voice in philosophy, philosophy’s self-image (and its need to be reawakened to its humanity), and the intricacies of truth and truthfulness in autobiography. Drawing important insights from autobiographical works by Benjamin, Sartre, Orwell, Edmund Gosse, Camus, and others, Hamilton explores the revealing way that the significance of a text can change for a reader over time; how undisclosed states of being remain hidden within, of all things, an autobiography; and how the voice of a text possesses a special power to draw us in. A brilliant and thought-provoking piece of work on a topic of deep human interest.’— Garry L. Hagberg, author of Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (2008), and Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood (forthcoming).
‘Philosophy and Autobiography is a truly excellent book--for its elegant, lively, and precise writing, for its lovely concreteness often achieved by intricate figures, for its lucid explanations, and for its timely and compelling argument. Hamilton manages to defend a difficult thesis about the autobiographical nature of philosophy not by analysis so much as by intimate and complex display of how autobiography affectively embodies processes of complex thinking.’
— Charles Altieri, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley
This book, taking its point of departure from Stanley Cavell’s claim that philosophy and autobiography are dimensions of each other, aims to explore some of the relations between these forms of reflection, first by seeking to develop an outline of a philosophy of autobiography, and then by exploring the issue from the side of five autobiographical works. Christopher Hamilton argues in the volume that there are good reasons for thinking that philosophical texts can be considered autobiographical, and then turns to discuss the autobiographies of Walter Benjamin, Peter Weiss, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Edmund Gosse and Albert Camus. In discussing these works, Hamilton explores how they put into question certain received understandings of what philosophical texts suppose themselves to be doing, and also how they themselves constitute philosophical explorations of certain key issues, e.g. the self, death, religious and ethical consciousness, sensuality, the body. Throughout, there is an exploration of the ways in which autobiographies help us in thinking about self-knowledge and knowledge of others. A final chapter raises some issues concerning the fact that the five autobiographies discussed here are all texts dealing with childhood.
Christopher Hamilton is Reader in Philosophy atKing’s College London, UK. He is the author of five previous books, including A Philosophy of Tragedy (2016), as well as articles in ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics.