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Philosopher biographies for the holidays?

Brian Leiter

A former law student of mine writes:

As gift-giving season comes around I find myself looking for a good biography of a philosopher to give a friend. When I saw the Christian Science Monitor quote that appears in the Amazon description of Ray Monk's Wittgenstein book ("Great philosophical biographies can be counted on one hand. Monk's life of Wittgenstein is such a one."), I figured I'd toss the thought over to you as a potential blog discussion topic. 

So, readers, what would you recommend and why? Signed comments preferred, but all comments must include a valid e-mail address, which will not appear.

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46 responses to “Philosopher biographies for the holidays?”

  1. Jacob Williamson

    Far from a conventional choice, but "Rousseau's Dog" surely rivals any ordinary biography for entertainment, and it offers some excellent insights into the temperaments of both Rousseau and Hume.

    Reply
  2. Kris McDaniel

    I really liked Kuehn's biography on Kant. I also enjoyed Antognazza's biography of Leibniz. Both do a good job of portraying the complexities of their subject matters: both the philosophies and the personal lives.

    Reply
  3. Antonio

    Nichola Lacey's 'A Life of H. L. Hart' is a wonderful philosophical biography.

    Reply
  4. Michael B

    'My Philosophical Development' by Bertrand Russell. If you think your friend would appreciate more than his philosophy, I liked his autobiography. Picked it up in a tiny bookshop in Nepal on my way to Mount Everest. Was *not* expecting to see Bertie when I walked in!

    Reply
  5. Brad Wray

    I would recommend Malachi Haim Hacohen's wonderful book, *Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna*. This is a fascinating period in Popper's life and career, and in European history as well. And Hacohen makes one feel Popper's frustrations as he struggles to get his career in Philosophy going.
    Edmond's and Eidinow's *Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten Minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers* is very enjoyable reading. Though less scholarly, it tells an engaging tell, contrasting the difficult personalities of Wittgenstein and Popper.

    Reply
  6. Nakul Krishna

    It's a bit of a doorstopper (and perhaps a little too much for someone with no previous interest in the man), but Bart Schultz's Henry Sidgwick: The Eye of the Universe is as good as it gets, ranging well beyond philosophy to talk about Sidgwick's feminism, ghosthusting and sexuality.

    Reply
  7. Nakul Krishna

    The authoritative biography of John Stuart Mill is yet to be written, but of the two recent attempts, Richard Reeves' Victorian Firebrand is to be preferred – the prose is better, and the concerns more accessible to the laity than those of Nicholas Capaldi's John Stuart Mill: A Biography.

    Reply
  8. Brock Sides

    Rebecca Goldstein's "Betraying Spinoza".

    Reply
  9. Jordan Bartol

    Robert Paul Wolff's autobiography, 'A Life in the Academy', is only available as an e-book. It has been praised here and elsewhere as a must read. Since e-books make bad gifts, I suggest you buy it, print if off, and have it bound. If you do it on the cheap at your local thesis-binding shop, it will add to the authentic academic feel.

    Reply
  10. Felix Sadeli

    "Betraying Spinoza" is a good read, but for a more comprehensive biographical account I much prefer Steven Nadler's "Spinoza: A Life".

    Reply
  11. David Morrice

    Ray Monk's Wittgenstein is superb, but also very good is Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein A Life: Young Ludwig (1889-1921). A pity the second volume never appeared.

    E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume is the authoritative biography.

    Better than Reeves and Capaldi is Michael St John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (if one can find a second hand copy).

    Maurice Cranston's three volume life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is surely the definitive work, although Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius is very readable. Also good is Cranston's John Locke.

    Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World covers the life and the work very well.

    David Macey, The Lives of Michael Foucault is more restrained than James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault.

    Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life is as good as one would expect from an expert.

    Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx is a great deal better than the title might suggest.

    Reply
  12. Anthony

    Also, Rebecca Goldstein's "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel" is a clearly written, fascinating account of Gödel's life and thought.

    Reply
  13. Matt Lister

    I also liked Macey's _The Lives of Michael Foucault_, but don't know how people who know more about Foucault than I do feel about it.

    Schultz's "intellectual biography" of Sidgwick is very good, but likely only for people interested in Sidgwick or those very close to him and also in philosophy.

    Reply
  14. Robert

    Hi, for the German speaking I can recommend the books by Rüdiger Safranski who is famous in Germany for his biographies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger (and some more). I read the ones about Schopenhauer and Heidegger which I both liked. He also discusses some of their philosophy, (in particular I appreciated his comments on Heidegger's philosophy, Schopenhauer is by himself much more accessible than Heidegger) don't know whether there are translation into English though.
    Also, Steven Nadler's recent book about Descartes seemed very interesting to me but I haven't read it (yet).

    Reply
  15. Tyler Chriscoe

    I second Nicola Lacey's book on Hart. Kuehn's biography on Kant is also enjoyable.

    Reply
  16. Adam

    Alan Turing wasn't only a philosopher, but he had remarkably influential philosophical ideas, to which Andrew Hodges' biography does full justice.

    Reply
  17. Michael Rosen

    I am reading Margaret Paul, Frank Ramsey: a Sister's Memoir and think very well of it.

    Reply
  18. Chris Surprenant

    I'll third Manfred Kuehn's biography on Kant. It's outstanding.

    Reply
  19. Nick

    I randomly picked up Bryan Magee's philosophical autobiography Confessions of a Philosopher at a used bookstore recently. The gimmick is it can double as an introduction to philosophy. And honestly I think he doesn't do a bad job of weaving the aims. It's not a "truly great" bio of a "truly great" philosopher, but I've found it interesting so far. It's wonderfully written and thoughtful regarding both the history of philosophy and his own unusual life. Plenty of anecdotes and asides from his time at Oxford and Yale around the 50s. It could be a neat, unexpected gift for the right person.

    Reply
  20. Canadian Grad Student

    A little philosophically problematic, but hugely entertaining, is Matthew Stewart's "The Courtier and the Heretic," about Leibniz and Spinoza's relationship and vastly different lives.

    Reply
  21. David Chalmers

    Seconding Ramsey and thirding Hart. The Fefermans' biography of Tarski is also terrific. Any good philosophical *auto*biographies apart from Russell and Wolff?

    Reply
  22. Shane Wahl

    Martin Matustik's, Jurgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile.

    Reply
  23. Benjamin A. Smith

    As a philosophy-student-turned-mathematics-teacher, I enjoyed Stephen Gaukroger's "Descartes: An Intellectual Biography". It shed light on Descartes' mathematical work, which (for this nonspecialist, at least) was less familiar than his metaphysical pursuits.

    Reply
  24. Benedict Eastaugh

    Anthony: Rebecca Goldstein's biography of Gödel is unfortunately strewn with errors. I would recommend that anyone considering purchasing this book first examine the reviews by Solomon Feferman, Juliette Kennedy and Gregory Moore.

    http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/lrb.pdf

    http://www.ams.org/notices/200604/rev-kennedy.pdf

    http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-incomplete-g-del

    They are all more or less damning, with Moore writing that

    'What is of lasting importance, however, is not Gödel's psychological idiosyncrasies but the great conceptual depth of his mathematical ideas. And unfortunately, between its first and last chapters Goldstein's book is the "death of a thousand cuts" to anyone who knows the history of mathematical logic and of Gödel's work in particular. Like hydrofluoric acid, the sheer accumulation of errors, both minor and major, erodes all the trust that the informed reader might have had in her book.'

    Reply
  25. Paul

    Ben Roger's "A.J. Ayer: A Life" is engaging and entertaining. Ayer's 'thin' experience of himself is fascinating.

    Reply
  26. Daniel Harris

    Paul Feyerabend's autobiography, Killing Time, is a really good read.

    Reply
  27. Roger Albin

    The Mossner biography of Hume is very enjoyable reading but decades old. It doesn't actually say a lot about Hume as a philospher but is primarily devoted to his career as a man of letters. Its useful but rather dated on Hume's 18th context and the Enlightenment.

    Reply
  28. Sam Clark

    Richard Reeves's biography of Mill, although it does good work recovering Mill the passionate radical, is philosophically inept. And the reason why there's no great biography of Mill is the long shadow of his own brilliant Autobiography.

    Reply
  29. Matthew

    I remember really enjoying Michael Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin: A Life.

    Reply
  30. Michael Sevel

    Marjorie Grene's A Philosophical Testament is something of an autobiography – interesting and sometimes humorous anecdotes mixed with philosophy. She was one of the earliest female philosophy PhDs in North America of the twentieth century. It's an engaging and unconventional book – about an unconventional life.

    Reply
  31. Alan White

    Every philosopher of physics and empirically informed philosopher of time should have a copy of Abraham Pais' "Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein". It is uncompromising and unsurpassed in presenting both elements of the subtitle.

    Reply
  32. John Tilley

    I found all of the following very enjoyable: Morton White's *A Philosopher's Story*; Ted Honderich's *Philosopher: A Kind of Life*; Ben Roger's *A. J. Ayer: A Life*; and Michael Ignatieff's *Isaiah Berlin: A Life.*

    Reply
  33. Matt DeStefano

    Brand Blanshard's "Four Reasonable Men" is a biography that ties together the lives of Marcus Aurelius, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Renan, and Henry Sidgwick with an analysis of "reasonableness". It's really interesting, and a pretty quick read.

    Reply
  34. Brian Leiter

    Lots of great suggestions, some of which I look forward to reading. I think my original correspondent was looking for something that an educated layperson, with an affection for philosophy, would enjoy. So something like Lacey's excellent biography of Hart–which is fascinating for anyone who knows about Hart, or about Oxford philosophy after WWII–is less likely to appeal to those outside our little universe. And Honderich's autoiography is, indeed, a fascinating study in human pettiness, but only if you know all the players and all the scores he relentlessly settles.

    Reply
  35. Michael B

    I'm not sure if this is wide of the mark but, in keeping with Brian's suggestion of something with wider appeal, I was given a copy of Einstein's 'The World As I see It'. It's not an autobiography but if I remember rightly it was a short collection of Einstein's writings on matters other than physics.

    If your intended recipient considers Einstein (also) a philosopher then perhaps the autobiography of Charles Darwin; after all, evolution was first put forward by a Greek philosopher, and considered by Aristotle.

    Reply
  36. praymont

    There's a good autobiography by Richard Wollheim called *Germs: A Memoir*, which has a Freudian bent but inc. material about Wollheim's father, an impresario who knew Diaghilev and Kurt Weill. This autobiography appeared in many 'Books of the Year' lists in 2004. It was reviewed favourably in the Guardian by the novelist Allan Hollinghurst.

    Robert (@ 14, above) mentioned Rudiger Safranski's biographies of Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. They've all been translated into English (but I can't comment on their quality — they're still on my TBR list).

    I recommend Grant Pick's on-line article in the Chicago Reader about Irving Thalberg, Jr. It's called 'A Philosopher's Life' and begins with this hook: 'Irving Thalberg Jr., born rich of Hollywood royalty, chose a low profile and a life of the mind.' The article describes some of Thalberg's politically progressive activities in the '60s and '70s when he taught at the Univ of Illinois in Chicago. It also compares Thalberg to his father, Irving Thalberg, Sr., who was a major Hollywood producer in the 20s. Thalberg, Jr.'s mother was the pre-Code Hollywood star Norma Shearer.

    Steven M. Cahn has edited a new collection (2013) of eight autobiographical pieces called Portraits of American Philosophy. The articles are drawn from the John Dewey Lectures and include items by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Harry Frankfurt, Ruth Barcan Marcus among others.

    Reply
  37. Allen Hazen

    I'd like to second Benedict Eastaugh's negative comment on Goldstein's book on Gödel: I found something like two dozen errors or misleading statements, some of them trivial (but also obvious enough that they should have been picked up). Which is a pity: I think that, with one more pass through editing and proofreading (and reading by a specialist logician) it could have been quite a good book!

    On the positive side… The Fefermans' biography of Tarski has been mentioned: I second the nomination– it's a very good book indeed. Mrs Feferman also wrote a biography of Jean Van Heijenoort (which I think had different titles in different printings): Van Heijenoort wasn't as great a logician as Tarski, but perhaps had a more interesting life…

    And can I put in a plug for Monk's two-volume biography of Russell? Monk doesn't LIKE Russell (it's odd, but philosophical fans of Wittgenstein tend to be anti-Russell… and maybe vice versa), and any time there is a choice of interpretations as between a more favorable and a less favourable, Monk comes down solidly on the condemnatory side– but his bias is so blatant that one is constantly reminded of it, and so can make allowances: because of this, I'd say, it can be read with profit and enjoyment even by Russell fans! … The first volume (covering Bertie roughly up to 1920) is particularly valuable: unlike previous biographies (Clark, in particular) it is written BY a philosophy, and so, I think, gives more of an impression of what it was like to BE Bertrand Russell. The second volume… is almost unbearably sad: the genuine disappoinments and tragedies of Russell's later years are … not minimized by … the biographer's bias against his subject.

    Reply
  38. Chris Surprenant

    Well, if the aim is something a bit lighter with more popular appeal, Wittgenstein's Poker is an entertaining read.

    Reply
  39. Michael Cain

    Collingwood's Autobiography

    Reply
  40. Michael Rosen

    @David Chalmers Philosophical autobiographies.

    Apart from the ones you refer to and J.S. Mill, no one has yet mentioned Collingwood's classic An Autobiography.

    Here are two little-known ones that are fascinating reading even if you know nothing about their authors' philosophical work:

    Karl Loewith, My Life In Germany Before And After 1933. The story is that a Harvard researcher wanted to survey the experience of German exiles so commissioned a competition for texts with that title. Loewith (who really needed the money) wrote this terrific narrative — and it didn't even win.

    Even more extraordinary is Salomon Maimon's autobiography. He was a self-taught itinerant with no fixed employment who ran away from a little village in Lithuania and wrote one of the most important early works engaging with Kantian philosophy. He gives an extraordinary picture of a very, very different world.

    Reply
  41. David Morrice

    Not biographies, but novels with biographical content: Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing); Jay Parini, Benjamin's Crossing (Walter Benjamin).

    Reply
  42. Tom Feeney

    Not good for entertainment, but enormously helpful for placing otherwise scattered fragments within a detailed story:

    "Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography" by Maria Rosa Antognazza

    Reply
  43. Tad Brennan

    If autobiographies can be included, then I strongly recommend Augustine's "Confessions," which has been read with pleasure by educated laypersons for over a millennium now.

    I also think very highly of Plato's Seventh Letter, whether it should be counted as autobiography or instead a biography written by [Plato]. Plato himself probably could have written a decent biography of Socrates if he had put his mind to it–some scattered notes for a proper biography can be found among his Complete Works, mixed in with miscellaneous observations.

    Porphyry's biography of Plotinus cannot be said to offer a real *picture* of its subject, but it does include a few dramatic episodes, plus a very helpful guide to the arrangement of the Enneads.

    For a collection of biographies that is sure to entertain, you cannot do better than Diogenes Laertius' "Lives of the Philosophers." It has humor, pathos, animal tricks, death scenes, and commemorative verses composed by Diogenes himself (and how many biographers were also first-rate poets? Certainly not Diogenes!) There are some slow bits where he talks about the doctrines and arguments of various schools, but he gets bored with philosophy more quickly even than your long-suffering relatives do, at which point he reverts to juicy gossip. He's like the ideal educated layperson writing for educated laypersons, only without the educated part.

    Reply
  44. Anand Vaidya

    The Story of My Experiments with Truth by M.K Gandhi is an autobiography. We don't often think of Gandhi as a philosopher, but his writings reveal a great deal of interest in philosophy. This book is a great read.

    Reply
  45. Stephen Krogh

    Chesterton's biography of Thomas Aquinas would certainly appeal to a wider audience, even if facts are sometimes sacrificed for the sake of a good story, which is often the case with hagiography.

    Reply
  46. va

    The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre
    http://amzn.com/0394747097

    i read this a long time ago. the only thing i remember is that it was amazing.
    n.b. it is the autobio of his first 10 years!

    Reply

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