Despite obvious exceptions - memoirs by John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau - autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher - the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus - seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion. As Stanley Cavell concedes at the outset of his own set of 'autobiographical exercises', the thinker who has chosen to examine himself risks turning 'philosophically critical discourse into clinical discourse'.

LRB 8 September 1994 | PDF Download