Walden Pond is about a mile from Concord, Massachussetts. It's not really a pond - more of a lake, as it's half a mile across. On July 4th 1845 Henry David Thoreau famously went to live in cabin he'd built near the shore here. He stayed therefor two years, and wrote a book based on his experiences, Walden
John Kaag, author of American Philosophy: A Love Story
In the South Cloisters of University College London is Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon, a sort of relic-statue made out of the remains of Bentham and his clothes, and with a wax head. There are all kinds of myths about this object. Philip Schofield, an expert on Bentham, and Director of the Bentham Project, discusses the fascinating history of what happened to Bentham's body, and why Bentham was so keen that he should have an afterlife in this form.
Check out the Jeremy Bentham Virtual Auto-Icon
Listen to Philip Schofield on Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon
28 Dean Street as it looks today:
Karl Marx and his family came to England in 1849, settling into 28 Dean Street, Soho, in London. They were in abject poverty and lived in squalid conditions in a two-roomed apartment. They lost three children while they lived in this and another apartment in the same street. A Prussian spy described how Marx lived in 1852:
"Washing and grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he is often drunk. Though he can often be idle for days on end, he will work day and night, with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the whole world coming and going though the room".
28 Dean Street, above Quo Vadis restaurant is now a desirable property, with a discreet blue plaque, but in the 1850s, this was an overcrowded filthy building, and the Marx's suffered terribly there.
How times change: when I photographed 28 Dean Street a few years ago, there were champagne bottles visible on the window sill of Marx's old apartment:
Read an interview with Terrell Carver about Marx and Marxism.
Listen to Jonathan Wolff on Philosophy Bites podcast on Marx and Alienation
Tucked behind the Huntingdon Road on the way out of Cambridge, near Storey’s Way, lies a small cemetery: Ascension Parish Graveyard. 83 of the people buried there are mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Among them are quite a few philosophers, including the author of Principia Ethica G.E. Moore, the brilliant mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey who died aged only 26, and the eccentric philosophical couple Elisabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. But by far the most famous of this graveyard’s inhabitants is the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. Many say the most important.
Listen to Barry C. Smith on Wittgenstein on Philosophy Bites.
Wittgenstein’s grave is not easy to find. It is a flat stone bearing the words Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951 in a sans serif modern font. It has the same stark simplicity as the Modernist house he designed for his sister in Vienna in the 1920s. The grave was recently restored: there is an interesting article with many photographs and details about the grave on the British Wittgenstein Society website.
Ray Monk, the interviewee for this episode of Philosophy Sites, is the author of a justly celebrated biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
Listen to Ray Monk discussing philosophy and biography on Philosophy Bites.
