queen’s academics contribute to book on philosophical letters

Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life is a new collection of philosophical letters, and commentaries on those letters, edited by Ada Bronowski (former Career Development Fellow in Philosophy at Queen’s), and published by Bloomsbury Academic.

The book contains 20 letters by philosophers, artists, and writers including Seneca, Schiller, Descartes, Marcus Aurelius, Rilke, Lucian of Samosata, and Oscar Wilde. Each letter is given a contextualising preface by an expert that brings out the reason this particular letter is a philosophical letter for life. As such, Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life provides a unique introduction to an array of thinkers throughout history as well as an argument for philosophy as conversation, a conversation which has been ongoing for centuries.

Several academics with links to Queen’s have been involved in this project. Nicholas Owen, Fellow in Politics, contributed a commentary on a letter from Mahatma Gandhi to Maganlal Gandhi written in 1910, in a chapter entitled ‘A Correspondence Theory of Truth’. Charlie Louth, Fellow in German, writes on ‘Dispelling the Tower of Fear’, looking at correspondence written by Rainer Maria Rilke to Lotte Hepner. Former Queen’s Junior Research Fellow Kelsey Rubin-Detlev also adds a chapter: ‘A Philosopher-Empress in a Revolutionary World’, about Catherine the Great writing to the Prince de Ligne.