This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel War Burton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com. In university departments one is taught the ideas of a few living philosophers and lots of dead ones.

These ideas are rarely contextualized in history and biography.

Ideas are weighed and assessed on their own merits in the abstract.

So can knowledge about the lives of philosophers provide useful insight into their ideas?

Can they help us interpret philosophical works?

A few facts in Ray Monk's biography.

One, he's a philosopher.

Two, he teaches at the University of Southampton,

and three, he's written a couple of best-selling biographies of philosophers.

Raymark, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hello.

The topic we're going to focus on today is philosophy and biography.

You've written two very well-known biographies, one of

Wittgenstein, the other one of Bertrand Russell. I wonder if you could say something about

how understanding the life of a philosopher might help us understand the things that they wrote.

Sure, I think it varies from case to case.

What drew me into biography was the attempt to understand Vikensstein in the days when I was a graduate student at Oxford

and I was studying actually Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics and it seemed to me that there

was repeated and systematic misunderstandings of Wittgenstein's later philosophy particularly

and especially his philosophy of mathematics.

...