The Philosophy of Solitude

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

• St Augustine
  Confessions (Penguin, 2002)
• Boethius
  The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin, 1999)
• Susan Cain
  Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Broadway Books, 2013)
• Albert Camus (trans. Carol Cosman)
  Exile and the Kingdom (Penguin, 2006)
• Daniel Defoe (ed. John Richetti)
  Robinson Crusoe (Penguin, 2003)
• Philip Koch
  Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter (Open Court Publishing Company, 1994)
• Jon Krakauer
  Into the Wild (Villard Books, 1996)
• Brother Lawrence
  The Practice of the Presence of God (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010) Google Books →
• Michel de Montaigne (trans. M.A. Screech)
  The Complete Essays (Penguin, 2013)
• Anthony Storr
  Solitude: A Return to the Self (Free Press, 1988)
• Henry David Thoreau (ed. J. Lyndon Shanley)
  Walden (Princeton University Press, 2004)

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Programme ID: b046ntnz

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b046ntnz

Auto-category: 128 (The Human Condition)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1845, the American writer Henry David Thoreau moved into a small log cabin he had built in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts.