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.
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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