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I’ve had a lot to say about Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus and his philosophical writing here on Peak Notions over these last few weeks. We’ve considered his account of how we might live good lives in a world —as Camus sees it— without meaning. For our recent session of the Peak Notions Book Club, we read and discussed Camus’ famed absurdist novel, The Stranger. You can watch the book club session back here, if you’ve been reading along with us or are curious to get to know his work a little better.
To close out our weeks of focusing on Camus, I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk with
of about Camus’ lasting relevance and impact. You may recognise Jonny from his own Substack, Mini Philosophy, his work with or from Instagram or TikTok, where he explains important and applicable ideas from philosophy to a cumulative audience of more than a million people.If you’re curious about Bayes’ Theorem , what Kant has to say about lying or what a Socratic conversation looks like, Jonny explains it all and more. It’s impossible to engage with his work and come away without having learned something new and interesting — I thoroughly recommend giving him a follow or subscribe. In this recording, Jonny shares his deep enthusiasm and understanding of Camus’ work as we consider what we can learn today from a philosopher who watched the world of his own time fall apart from German-occupied Paris, and who made enduring contributions to philosophy as he worked to make sense of the global chaos in which he found himself.
As Jonny and I discuss in this video, philosophy can provide us with a valuable set of cognitive tools for living — it’s not all dense and consciously impenetrable. Philosophy is theory — something we all use each day to make both trivial and high-stakes decisions (‘White or brown bread?’; ‘Should I lie to my friend to make them feel better?’; ‘Do I want to be a parent?’; ‘Why should I get out of bed in the morning?’). Through philosophy, we each build our own theory of how the world works and how best to live in it, so it’s best to be conscious of the processes we engage in to do this. Here, Jonny and I discuss the death of meaning in our own time and what we might learn from ideas Camus was writing about in 1942, why Camus’ absurdism remains so enduringly appealing and unsettling (read: cool) to readers, and whether meaning really matters as much as Camus thought it did.
If you enjoy Peak Notions, you might like my book on modern identity and how we figure out who we are in a world that’s so eager to tell us:
Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By.
