Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Bibliography: Biographical and Psychological Dimensions of Philosophy

Biographical and Psychological Dimensions of Philosophy:
Selected Bibliography

compiled by Ralph Dumain

“No hero is a hero to his valet, not, however, because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is—a valet . . .” — G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit [C (BB).VI.C.c.665]

General Works: Books

Griffiths, A. Phillips, ed. The Impulse to Philosophise. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. See esp. “Scenes from My Childhood” by Bryan Magee and “The Roots of Philosophy” by John White.

Herzberg, Alexander. The Psychology of Philosophers . London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1929. (Routledge; Reprint edition, July, 1999.)

Levi, Albert William. Philosophy as Social Expression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. See Descartes' Dualism (Extract from Chapter 4) & "Philosophy's Historic Fate: Museum Pieces, Messages, and Classics" (Chapter 6, Conclusion).

Rodgers, Nigel; Thompson, Mel. Philosophers Behaving Badly. Peter Owen Publishers, May 2005.

Scharfstein, Ben-Ami. The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1980.

Schuster, Shlomit C. The Philosopher's Autobiography: A Qualitative Study. Foreword by Maurice Friedman. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

Simpson, David. Situatedness: Or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

General Works: Essays

Baggini, Julian. “The Biographers: Can We Learn Anything Important from the Biographies of the Great Philosophers?”, The Philosophers' Magazine, no. 7, 1999, pp. 14-15.

Baggini, Julian. “Philosophical Autobiography,” Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 3, S 2002, pp. 295-312.

Baggini, Julian. “What Philosophers Are Really Like,” The Philosophers' Magazine.

Blumenau, Ralph. “The Psychology & Psychopathology of Philosophers,” Philosophy Now, no. 48, October/November 2004, pp. 36-37.

Handy, Rollo. “Personality Factors And Intellectual Production,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 23, October 1956, pp. 325-332.

Jay, Martin. “Speaking Azza” [review of: Situatedness: Or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From by David Simpson], London Review of Books, Vol. 24, No. 23, 28 November 2002.

Madden, Edward H; Madden, Marian C. “Philosophical Biography: The American Scene,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 28, no. 4, Fall 1992, pp. 609-643.

Madigan, Tim. “The Uses and Abuses of Philosophical Biographies,” Philosophy Now, no. 35, March/April 2002, pp. 26-28.

Pieter, Jozef. “Problems and Methods of the Psychology of Philosophizing,” Dialectics and Humanism, 2, Autumn 1975, pp. 151-166.

Robinson, Bryan W. “Comments on Rollo Handy's "Personality Factors and Intellectual Production, ” Philosophy of Science, vol. 24, April 1957, p. 204.

Rodgers, Nigel; Thompson, Mel. “Not So High and Mighty,” The Philosophers' Magazine, no. 29, 1st quarter, 2005, pp. 11-13.

Case Studies: Books

Edmonds, David; Eidinow, John. Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. New York: Ecco, 2001.

Case Studies: Essays

Monk, Ray. “Philosophical Biography,” in: New British Philosophy: The Interviews, edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), Chapter 1, pp. 9-24.

Neumaier, John J. "From a Thesis on Bertrand Russell to the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: Philosophy as Biography," in: Diverse Perspectives on Marxist Philosophy: East and West, edited by Sara F. Luther, John J. Neumaier, and Howard L. Parsons (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995).

Quirk, Michael J. The Heidegger Case. 2000.

Sinclair, Robert . Biography as Philosophy: American Pragmatism and the Social Context of Ideas. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 32nd Annual Meeting, March 3– 5, 2005, Bakersfield, CA.

Govier, Trudy. "Philosophy, Life and Philosophies of Life," Philosophy Now, no. 49, January/February 2005, pp. 23-25.

Verene, Donald P. “The Limits of Argument: Argument and Autobiography,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 26, no. 1, 1993, pp. 1-8.

Psychological Research

Alexander, Joshua; Buckner, Cameron; Gonnerman, Chad; Weinberg, Jonathan M. (2010). "Are Philosophers Expert Intuiters?", Philosophical Psychology 23 (3): 331-355.

Machery, Edouard; Scheines, Richard; Feltz, Adam; Sytsma, Justin; Livengood, Jonathan. (2010). "Philosophical Temperament," Philosophical Psychology 23 (3): 313-330.

General Works: Web Sources / Bibliography

Suber, Peter. Philosophy as Autobiography: Psychologistic, Reductive, & Non-Immanent Readings of Philosophy.

Links on this site:

Letter to Simon Foucher (1675) by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Karl Marx vs. Cynical Reason: On Suppositions of Naked Self-Interest

Karl Marx on Philosophy after Its Completion

Marx's Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy (Extracts on Total Philosophy, Praxis, Historiography)

Philosophy as Autobiography: Alternatives to Subjectivism by R. Dumain

Review: Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew by R. Dumain

"Popes, Kings & Cultural Studies: Placing the commitment to non-disciplinarity in historical context" by Karl Maton

The Partial Sociology of Philosophies: The Historical Perspective of Randall Collins (An Unfinished Review) by Ralph Dumain

How to Integrate Philosophy and Everyday Life: To Think Philosophically in Life, Or Reproduce the Fragmentation of Knowledge?