Jonathan Egid - Biography
Hi, I’m Jonathan. I was born in South-East London and raised in a small village in Warwickshire. I teach philosophy at SOAS, University of London, having recently completed my PhD down the road at King's College London on the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and the controversy over its authorship. Beyond the aim of clarifying this intractable debate, and bringing these neglected works to a wider audience, I'm interested in thinking about different ways of writing the history of philosophy, in particular what a truly global history of philosophy would look like. I also do a bit of translation work from French and Gə’əz. I am a BBC New Generation thinker for 2024, and a British Society for the History of Philosophy Postgraduate Fellow for the 2023-4 academic year.
Before starting at King’s, I worked as a tutor in a Greek language school, a convent in Hampstead and the suburbs of north London. Before that I read for the BPhil in Philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford, where I wrote a thesis about ‘the anxiety of alternatives’ with Prof A.W. Moore. Before that I lived in a small village in Crete and studied at the University of Kent in Canterbury, having spent a year as an exchange student at the Université Paris IV – la Sorbonne.
My philosophical heroes are Wittgenstein, Kant and Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Some of the writers I love most are Amos Oz, Nikos Kazantzakis, Ursula le Guin and W.G Sebald. Musically I like Psarantonis, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Debussy, Mulatu Astatke, Kendrick Lamar. My favourite places in the world are Mull, Ein Gedi and Sfakia, where the above photograph was taken.