In this volume, scholars from a number of academic disciplines illuminate how a range of philosophers and other thoughtful individuals addressed the complex issues surrounding philosophy and life writing.

The contributors interrogate the writings of Teresa of Avila, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Dilthey, Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Bryan Magee, Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Judith Butler, who range in time from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

As this volume demonstrates, the relationship between philosophy and life writing has become an issue of urgent interdisciplinary concern.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

D. L. LeMahieu is the Hotchkiss Presidential Professor of History at Lake Forest College, USA. His work includes The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher and his Age (1976) and A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind (1988).

Christopher Cowley is Associate Professor at the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland. His work includes Moral Responsibility (author, 2013), Supererogation (editor, 2015), and The Philosophy of Autobiography (editor, 2015).