Conversations in Philosophy

Conversations in Philosophy

London Review of Books

Episodes 14
Avg. Duration 14m
Activity Sporadic
Since Jan 2025
Latest Episode Dec 2025

Publishing Details

Schedule
Monthly
Format
Serial
Consistency
100%
Hosting
feeds.megaphone.fm

Contact & Outreach

About This Podcast

Jonathan Rée and James Wood challenge a hundred years of academic convention by reuniting the worlds of philosophy and literature, as they consider how style, narrative, and the expression of ideas play through philosophical writers including Kierkegaard, Mill, Nietzsche, Woolf, Beauvoir and Camus. James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a contributor to the London Review of Books. His books include How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self. Jonathan Rée is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and a freelance writer and philosopher. His most recent book on philosophy is Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from these episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Get in touch: [email protected]

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Recent Episodes

'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

Dec 08, 2025 18m

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the…

'The Sovereignty of Good' by Iris Murdoch

Nov 10, 2025 13m

Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clearly and justly she comes to…

'The Fall' by Albert Camus

Oct 13, 2025 15m

Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about…

'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir

Sep 15, 2025 14m

At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either…

'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre

Aug 17, 2025 15m

What is an emotion? In his 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to…

'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger

Jul 20, 2025 15m

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the…

'The Will to Believe' by William James

Jun 22, 2025 17m

Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally…

'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche

May 25, 2025 29m

For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is…

'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley

Apr 27, 2025 14m

T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent…

'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill

Mar 30, 2025 14m

Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a…

'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mar 03, 2025 15m

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are.…

'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach

Feb 03, 2025 10m

In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the…

'Fear and Trembling' by Søren Kierkegaard

Jan 06, 2025 12m

The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and…

Introducing 'Conversations in Philosophy'

Jan 01, 2025 8m

James Wood and Jonathan Rée introduce their new Close Readings series, Conversations in Philosophy, running throughout 2025. They explain the title of the series and why they'll be challenging a…

Frequently Asked Questions

How many episodes does Conversations in Philosophy have?

Conversations in Philosophy has published 14 episodes since January 2025, covering topics in Arts, Books.

Is Conversations in Philosophy still active?

Conversations in Philosophy is currently sporadic with new episodes monthly. Average episode length is 14m.

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