Category: Articles & Essays

Contemporary anglophone philosophy has paid very little attention to biography. Its traditional emphasis is on the primacy of argument, the soundness of which has nothing to do with who happens to be making it. To bring the life or personality of a philosopher into a discussion of one of their arguments brings accusation of committing the ad hominem fallacy: addressing the arguer not the argument. …ronically, this means that although it was in continental European philosophy that the idea of “the death of the author” took hold, in Britain and America the authorial voice has been quietly but more efficiently and deliberately buried.