Speaker Bio

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Director of the Onassis Foundation. His books include Very Little…Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009) and The Faith of the Faithless (2012). He has also written a novella, Memory Theatre (2015), a book-length essay, Notes on Suicide (2020) and studies of David Bowie, Football and Apply-Degger (Onassis, 2020). More recent books are Tragedy, The Greeks and Us (Pantheon, 2019) and Bald (Yale, 2021). He was series moderator of ‘The Stone’, a philosophy column in The New York Times and co-editor of three volumes connected to the series, most recently Question Everything (2022). He is 50% of an obscure musical combo called Critchley & Simmons, whose album, Gone Forever, was released in 2024. Mysticism – The Experience of Ecstasy was published by The New York Review of Books (USA) and Profile (UK) in November 2024. A short book called I Want To Die, I Hate My Life – Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett was published in 2025 with ERIS.