Some years ago I wrote a book devoted to the history of a single philosophical keyword, ‘altruism’, coined by the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte in 1851. It was my first foray into the cultural history of philosophy.

Partly inspired by this previous project, I decided to include a series of posts on the Cultural History of Philosophy blog on ‘Philosophical Keywords’ – short essays on the histories, meanings, and significance of words that have crossed over from philosophy into […]
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Welcome to the new Cultural History of Philosophy blog at Queen Mary University of London.

The main aim of this blog – and of the QMUL undergraduate module it accompanies – is to take a fresh approach to the history of philosophy, by exploring the ways that philosophers and philosophies have shaped public life, popular culture, and personal identity – sometimes in unnoticed and unconscious ways. This will be a kind of history that approaches philosophical texts and ideas from the outside in […]
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