Samuel Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes

The Irish writer and Nobel Prize winner, Samuel Beckett, assembled for himself a history of western philosophy during the 1930s, just at the point at which his first novel, Murphy, was coming together. The ‘Philosophy Notes’, together with related notes taken at that time about St. Augustine, thereafter provided Beckett with a store of knowledge, but also with phrases and images, which he took up in the major work that won him international and enduring fame, from the dramas Waiting for Godot and Endgame, through to the late prose works Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still. This edition presents, for the first time, Beckett’s full ‘Philosophy Notes’, which constitute his most extensive unpublished text. The Notes display Beckett’s own interests and emphases within the history of western philosophy, and we see Beckett’s original thoughts on all of these figures for the first time. The Edition contains an extensive Introduction, and the Notes are annotated throughout in order to suggest ways in which particular aspects of the philosophy narrated here by Beckett suggest fresh insights into those later writings.