Stephen Trombley: Wise Words

In a rare visit to the UK, Emmy award winning director, Stephen Trombley, will talk about the philosophy of everyday life.

Stephen Trombley will mine the canon of two and half millennia of Western thought for observations that reflect the seriousness, the joy and the strangeness of human existence, counterpointing these words of wisdom with episodes – sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, sometimes plain odd – from the lives of the great philosophers.

Stephen Trombley edited the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought with Alan Bullock, and is author of the recently-published Wise Words: The Philosophy of Everyday Life – a miscellany which scours the canon of western thought to discover philosophers’ views on everyday subjects ranging from advice to ageing, backbiting to bigotry, freedom to friendship, work to walking. Other recent works include A Short History of Western Thought and Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World.

As a documentary filmmaker his work focused on the death penalty, eugenics, the Holocaust and nuclear weapons. He won an Emmy in 1996 for his film on the Nuremberg trials.