Constantine Sandis On The Psychology Of Philosophy And Wittgensteinian Ethics

An exploration of the connections between psychology and philosophy with an emphasis on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein

Academic and author, Sandis has published a wide range of books and in this interview, he talks about how philosophy helped him cope with cancer, the influence of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and more.

What were your first experiences with philosophy and how did they shape your formative years?

Thank you for inviting me. I don’t have a vivid recollection of my first encounter with philosophy. My father read a vast library and I remember being intrigued by the relatively small section of philosophy books in it.

This included many books on Indian Philosophy (I was born in New Delhi, some ancient Greek Philosophy, several introductions to the subject (e.g., Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy), Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, a Greek translation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra by the author Nikos Kazantzakis (who wrote a PhD thesis on Nietzsche), and fiction by de Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre.

I also listened to a lot of music from a young age and — as with plays and novels — was intuitively attracted to songs with loosely philosophical lyrics, whether it was Black Sabbath, Duran Duran, the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, or Jacques Brel.

I didn’t study any philosophy in school because there was no such option, but it was pretty obvious to me that if I went to University at all, this was what I was going to study. The first philosophy books I picked out for myself, while in my last year of school, were Keith Ansell-Pearson’s An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker and two volumes edited by Ted Honderich entitled Philosophy As It Was and Philosophy As It Is.

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