I discovered the existence of Lars Svendsen thanks to a forum discussion about - of all things - the modern apparel industry. One of the comments mentioned in passing his "Fashion: A Philosophy" and the idea of someone writing a philosophical analysis of Fashion intrigued me… so I checked out the book on Amazon. In doing this, I discovered that Svendsen was apparently going through a series of concepts (Amazon currently lists Work, Fashion, Boredom, Freedom, Loneliness, Fear, Evil…) analyzing each through the lens of Philosophy. Of these, Loneliness seemed the most compelling to me, much more than Fashion: while I never really devoted much time to Fashion, I definitely spent most of my life being alone, and while it may be a bit late for changing this I am always eager to learn something new or to better understand things I know already, so I ordered "A Philosophy of Loneliness".

A little aside - having more or less neglected Philosophy after high school I had no clear idea of what "Philosophy" is supposed to mean, especially in modern terms. So I am doubly happy about this book: not only it provided valuable insight into the main topic, but it also gave me a clear example of how Practical Philosophy is supposed to work.

In 138 pages (plus notes and a full index) the author analyses the concept of "being alone", alternating literary and scientific sources to illuminate a concept which at the same time familiar to everyone, and yet seemingly impossible to define in objective terms.

What do we really know about "being alone", after all? The author himself clearly states in his introduction that working on the book he discovered that most of what he "knew" about loneliness would prove to be incorrect if not completely false.

I have decided to structure the "review" as follows: for each of the eight chapters I will juxtapose a brief description of the contents (on the left) with what I - personally - found poignant based on my own experience at being "alone".

One more thing: in reading this (and especially in browsing it again to prepare this post), I often echoed some concepts I learned during a philosophical seminar by Cacciari - identity/difference can be defined only in terms of each other: I don't remember Loneliness to be topic during the seminar, but the general concept of "the concept of oneself existing only in juxtaposition with others" kept resurfacing for the whole seminar.