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When the French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau set out to write his Confessions in 1782, he proposed ‘to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; this man shall be myself’. Philosophers have long engaged with the confessional form, from Plato and Augustine to Derrida and Cixous. Is biography an inherently philosophical medium? How does life inflect the philosophy of any given thinker? Or should we make a distinction between the facts of a philosopher’s life and their philosophical thought? Join us at the Forum for this discussion of philosophy and the art of biography.

Speakers
Hannah Dawson, Senior Lecturer in the History of Political Thought, KCL; Author, Life Lessons from Hobbes
Robert Rowland Smith, Quondam Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford; Author, Autobiophilosophy and Driving with Socrates
Helen Tyson, Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century British Literature, University of Sussex

Chair
Shahidha Bari, Fellow, Forum for Philosophy; Senior Lecturer in Romanticism, Queen Mary University of London

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