Episode 695: Clare Carlisle
October 28th, 2026
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Faith, Reason, and Habit: Living Philosophically
Clare Carlisle is a professor of philosophy at King’s College London and the author of several books. Her latest works are titled, Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy and The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life.
Greg and Clare discuss what it means to be religious today through a Spinozist (Baruch Spinoza) lens, contrasting medieval religion as a virtue (behavior and “due honor to God”) with modern religion as ‘belief and belonging’ after the Reformation. Clare explains how Spinoza rethinks virtue as “power and flourishing” and God as “God or nature,” why he was seen as an atheist (rejecting anthropomorphic God, divine goodness, biblical authority, and institutional religion), and how The Ethics links metaphysics to human joy and emotional life.
They also discuss doing philosophy beyond writing, philosophy’s relation to literature and life-writing, why biographies matter, “Devotion’s” shift from religion to art and marriage, “Habit’s” double character and its relation to practice, “to kalon” blending ethics and aesthetics, contrasts with Kierkegaard on faith and institutional critique, differences between philosophy and theology, universities and existential questions, and Spinoza separating science from other concerns.
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Episode Quotes:
Devotion is more than a feeling
26:22: So devotion is, it’s to do with love, commitment, and desire. But it's very much a sort of lived phenomenon. It wouldn't make sense to say that you're devoted to something if you're just not really spending any time pursuing that thing. So whereas when we use the word love, love can mean so many different things. It might just refer to a sort of feeling we have or an emotion that we have. I think in the case of devotion, there's got to be something inherently practical and expressive about it, and it's to do with giving your time to something that you value.
Philosophy has more than one path
16:07: Philosophy means the love of wisdom or the pursuit of wisdom, and so there are many different ways of going about that. And writing is just one of them.
Why Spinoza resisted labels
11:08: Putting Spinozism into any kind of sort of ready-made box, whether that's the box marked atheism or the box marked Christianity or Judaism, doesn't really do justice, not just to the fact that Spinozism is very sort of distinctive and in a way it doesn't fit into any box, but also, more importantly, I think Spinoza wrote philosophy in a way where he was actively resisting that kind of box-categorizing, labeling way of thinking about human life in general, and particularly about religion.
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Guest Work:
Kierkegaardian Essays: A Festschrift in Honour of George Pattison
Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions