The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy

by Andy West

***🏆 A Five Books Book of the Year ***

This is a very personal memoir by Andy West, about growing up with a father who spent time in prison and his experiences teaching philosophy in prisons as an adult. The accounts of his lessons–one of the first is on ‘freedom’—and how the men he is teaching respond to them are really thought-provoking.

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“Andy is a teacher of philosophy in prisons but he’s also somebody who’s had a lot of family experience in prisons from the inside, because his father, his uncle, and his brother, have all spent time in jail. So he’s got an ambivalent attitude to prisons and I think his family said, ‘What on earth are you going teaching in prisons for? That’s another one that ended up inside!’ He has a particularly interesting take on all this. It’s partly constructed memoir: he discusses the sessions where he teaches philosophy to prisoners, but for reasons of privacy, he hasn’t revealed too much about the identities of particular prisoners.” Read more...

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Nigel Warburton, Philosopher