October collection: Exploring the Enlightenment
Explore reason, rights and toleration through essays, Beyond the Text and Reading Club discussions.
PODCAST · ARTICLES · SEMINAR ARCHIVE
Ideas do not live on the page alone.
Beyond the Text brings intellectual history and philosophy into conversation through podcasts, scholarly articles and an archive of seminar conversations.
The latest conversations
Listen to recent discussions of texts, thinkers and the historical settings that give ideas their force.
Listen directly on Buzzsprout, or choose an episode with reading notes and discussion links.
Explore Beyond the Text
Podcast
Free-form conversations, interviews and close engagement with major works in intellectual history and philosophy.
Seminar archive
Explore the completed Liberty, Heritage and Revolution programmes, built around primary texts and significant thinkers.
Articles
Short but scholarly essays that introduce important arguments, traditions and texts in their historical settings.
Ideas are better in company
Our completed seminar series made room for serious discussion without losing the pleasure of conversation. Liberty, Heritage and Revolution carried audiences from the ancient world to modern political and philosophical debate.
Latest writing
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Can We Tell the Truth About Ourselves? Rousseau and the Confessions
Begin with the opening of Rousseau’s Confessions, then the stolen ribbon episode in Book II. Notice how recollection, motive and an appeal for understanding can pull in different directions. The central question is how we judge a story told by the person whose conduct is at issue.
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Who Gets to Call Whom Barbarous?
Montaigne on custom, cruelty and cultural judgement: Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson ask who gets to call another society barbarous.
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How Should We Learn to Live and Die?
Explore Montaigne on death, education and everyday experience with Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson in the second Beyond the Text conversation.
SAMUEL WOODALL · RESEARCH · WRITING
From The Intellectual Historian
Follow Samuel’s individual academic work on eighteenth-century political thought, religion, faction and loyal opposition.
- Rousseau’s Confessions makes sincerity a problem of memory, self-justification and the reader’s judgement.
- Montaigne on custom, cruelty and cultural judgement: Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson ask who gets to call another society barbarous.
- What intellectual historians study, how contextualism works, and why texts are best understood as actions within historical debates.
Stay with the conversation
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