Philosophical Personal Essays: A Critical Assessment
Tom Stern (UCL)

In the course of about fifteen years, I have written the occasional philosophical personal essay. By ‘philosophical personal essays’, I mean an essay in the tradition which is typically thought to begin with Montaigne. The author’s character or personal experience plays a major role in whatever point that is being made. Recently, I began teaching how to criticise, edit and write such essays in a dedicated undergraduate module. A major reason I wanted to teach the class was to try to answer a question I have long had: what is gained and lost when we write philosophy in this way?

Tom Stern is a professor of philosophy at UCL. He is the author of Philosophy and Theatre (2013) and Nietzsche’s Ethics (2020). He edited the New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (2019) and The Proustian Mind (2022). He sometimes writes philosophical personal essays.

For further inquiries: Yuxin Su (yuxin.su.16@ucl.ac.uk).