I first discovered philosophy as a teenager emerging from a dark place. There was a copy of Albert Camus’s The Outsider lying around the house that I devoured and it left me hungry for more; it turns out we also had a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus and reading the following on the first page I knew that I was home at last:

There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.

Ever since then philosophy has been core to my life. Though I loved my time studying philosophy in university, I was disillusioned with the distance between philosophy and real life. By this point I was a lover of Nietzsche who wrote that to the philosopher “there is nothing whatever that is impersonal” and the ancient philosophers who spoke about eudaimonia — the good life — and worked at living their philosophy.

I always fancied that someday I would set up my own school of philosophy, a school that was dedicated to embodying the wisdom of philosophy and learning the art of the good life. The Living Philosophy is the beginning of that vision.

James Cussen