Introduction

The fertile conjunction of philosophy and life writing generates many possibilities for study: the relationship between conceptual abstractions and the subjectivities of the philosophers who created them; the frustrating limitations of language to recapture lived experience; the fragilities of memory; the problem of ascribing meaning to experiences that elude coherent explanation; the persistent risk of self-deception. A careful reading of these essays reveals the porousness of any typology that seeks to categorise them. Moral concerns about the truthfulness or hubris of life writing blend into the limits of self-knowledge generated by the conundrums of structure and agency. Drawing from the Reveries, Menin shows how Rousseau conceptualised the notion of a ‘moral truth’ which differed from conventional views of true and false.