Michael Davis - The Autobiography of Philosophy

This is the most important book about the nature of philosophy and of the human soul published this year. In making the condition for its own possibility its deepest concern, philosophy is necessarily about itselfit is autobiographical. The first part of The Autobiography of Philosophy interprets Heideggers Being and Time, Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Morals, Aristotles Metaphysics, and Platos Lysis as examples of the implicitly autobiographical character of philosophy. The second part is a reading of Rousseaus The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Although Rousseaus explicitly autobiographical writings are more often read for the tantalizing details of his rather eccentric life than for their philosophical import, this work is an artful use of Rousseaus exile and isolationthe strangest position in which a mortal could ever find himselfas a paradigm for the human soul in its relation to the world. In powerfully articulating the activity that is at the core of all philosophy, The Reveries articulates the nature of the human soul for which this activity is the defining possibility.