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. I teach courses on epistemology, hermeneutics and the history of philosophy, and my current research focuses on Ethiopia, India different ways of writing the history of philosophy, and what a truly global history of philosophy might 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.