Thinking with Our Ears

Philosophy is usually read in silence, but François Noudelmann asks what happens if we listen to it instead. Thought, he points out, is not quiet. It can arrive as a roar or as the faintest rustle, and we tend to forget that. Some thinkers have even tried to hush it. Yet inside the writings of philosophers there are still cries and murmurs to be heard.

Noudelmann treats the voices and accents of philosophers as part of their ideas, not as something separate from them. His book moves from the acoustic devices of the ancient world to the microphone of the present day, and he listens closely along the way, like a doctor with a stethoscope pressed to the body of philosophy.

Out of this listening he builds what he calls a sound ecology of thought. The aim is to study the sound environments in which philosophy gets made, and to see how philosophy in turn shapes those environments. It is an invitation to read the history of ideas with the ears as well as the eyes.