Jonathan Rée was a professor of philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic until he gave up teaching, as he has put it, to have more time to think. His books include Proletarian Philosophers, Philosophical Tales, Heidegger and Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English. He has also edited his father’s memoirs of fighting in the French Resistance, published by Yale as A Schoolmaster’s War. He presented ‘Conversations in Philosophy’, an LRB Close Readings podcast series, with James Wood. Ten of his pieces for the LRB, on thinkers from Spinoza to Sartre, have been collected in an audiobook, Becoming a Philosopher.
Descartes’s Meditations tells the story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he says, since he decided to take this meditative mini-break, and now at last he has cleared a whole week to spend in an isolated house with only his thoughts and memories for company. He is planning to...
You might have expected the idea of Enlightenment to have gone out of fashion by now. Indeed you might have expected the entire pack of tacky Victorian labels for cultural periods – the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Romanticism, Modernity and so on – to have fallen into disuse long ago. They seem to belong to a world we have lost, where the whole of history was a brief, memorable tale...
In October 1951 one of the biggest celebrities of British radio entertainment went missing in the course of a railway journey from London to Leeds. His disappearance coincided with Labour’s defeat in the general election, and to many people it came as an even greater shock. He had been doing his cheeky-boy routines on the wireless since 1944, and for the past two years had been starring...
During the 1790s the little town of Jena, in Saxony, blossomed into colourful activity. With active support from Goethe, ducal minister in nearby Weimar, the ancient university cast off its reputation for beery rowdiness and intellectual torpor. Schiller was given a post there in 1789, and Fichte in 1794, and their passionate lectures – delivered in German rather than the customary...
Following his review of a new biography, Jonathan Rée speaks to Tom about Friedrich Hayek’s celebrity and infamy, and the ways close reading reveals surprising nuance in his work.
Philosopher Jonathan Rée unravels the story within Spinoza's knotty work of 17th century rationalism, the Ethics
Jonathan Rée considers Kierkegaard’s unfinished work, Johannes Climacus, about a student who falls in love with thinking.
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment, Camus became a journalist...
Harry Rée wanted his British audience to understand that the French men and women who had taken part in the Resistance were not superhuman. ‘What I shall try to get across,’ he told a symposium in...
Jonathan Rée takes some tomfoolery from Shakespeare for his title and uses it to create his own striking metaphor. The middle part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices...
Sometime in the late Sixties, I was invited, along with some senior socialist historians, to meet Bill Craik, a veteran and pioneer, so I was told, of independent working-class education. The...
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