Professor Simon May
Visiting Professor of Philosophy
Email simon.may@kcl.ac.uk
Research interests
Simon May's interests lie in ethics, German idealism – especially the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger – and philosophy of the emotions. He is also a devotee of the aphoristic form.
Publications and work-in-progress
His monographs include Love: A History (Yale University Press, 2011) and Nietzsche's Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’ (Oxford University Press, 1999). He is editor of Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2011), to which he contributed a paper entitled ‘Why Nietzsche is still in the morality game’; and co-editor, with Ken Gemes, of Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy (Oxford University Press, 2009), for which he wrote a paper entitled ‘Nihilism and the Free Self’.
He is the author of ‘Thinking Aloud: A Collection of Aphorisms’ (Alma Books, 2009), a book of his own aphorisms which was named a Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’ in 2009. An earlier edition of this book appeared in Spanish (Planeta, 2001), Dutch (Spectrum, 2001) and Italian (RCS Libri: Sonzogno 2000), and a selection of his aphorisms is included in Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, published by Bloomsbury - an anthology drawn from the world’s main traditions.
He is currently at work on a book entitled ‘Love: A Phenomenology’.