Simon Critchley was born on 27 February 1960, in Letchworth Garden City, England, to a working-class family originally from Liverpool.

My only religious commitment is to Liverpool Football Club.’[7][8] In grammar school, he studied history, sciences, languages (French and Russian) and English literature.

While the music failed, there was a silver lining to the experience: a newfound love for Chinese food, inspired by Warren Zevon.

[12][13] After studying for remedial 'O' and 'A' level exams at a community college while doing other odd jobs, Critchley went to university aged 22.

[14] Amongst his teachers were Jay Bernstein, Robert Bernasconi, Ludmilla Jordanova, Onora O’Neill, Frank Cioffi, Mike Weston, Roger Moss, and Gabriel Pearson.

Critchley argues that this Levinasian conception of ethical experience informs Derrida's deconstruction and develops the idea of clôtural reading.

Through a long preamble on nihilism, Critchley rejects the view that an affirmation of finitude can redeem the meaning of life.

Critchley then develops this thesis through discussions of Blanchot, Levinas, Cavell, German Romanticism, Adorno, Derrida, Beckett, and Wallace Stevens.

Amongst these essays, Critchley discusses a variety of historical and contemporary figures (e.g., Hegel, Heidegger, Jean Genet, Derrida, Levinas, Richard Rorty, Laclau, Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Blanchot) as well as topics (e.g., politics, subjectivity, race (human categorization) in the Western philosophical canon, psychoanalysis, comedy, friendship, and others).

[28] Critchley defends these claims through discussions of such figures as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Carnap, and others as well as such topics as the relationship between knowledge and wisdom, literature, science, politics, and nihilism.

[29] Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the poetry of Wallace Stevens (Routledge, 2005) In Things Merely Are, Critchley argues for two claims: (1) that Wallace Stevens's poetry affords significant and illuminating philosophical insights and (2) that the best way to express such insights is poetically.

Specifically, Critchley argues that Stevens's poetry offers readers a novel take on the relationship between mind, language and material things, which overcomes modern epistemology.

[35] To that end, Critchley discusses the deaths (and lives) of philosophers ranging from Thales and Plato to Confucius and Avicenna (Ibn Sina), from Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Hegel to Heidegger and Frantz Fanon.

Critchley discusses his own work and development through a variety of topics (e.g., deconstruction, nihilism, politics, the literary, punk, tragedy, and more).

It is very much a fan's book that attempts to confer the appropriate aesthetic dignity on Bowie's work through a careful analysis of his lyrics and the exploration of themes of inauthenticity, isolation, truth and the longing for love.

It is concerned with the building of a memory theatre, the delusive attempt to control one's relation to mortality and the progressive dismantling of the standard image of the philosopher.

What We Think When We Think About Football (Profile Books/Penguin, 2017) Critchley argues that football occupies a particular place in society in that it at once originates from sociality and solidarity (e.g., that many teams formed from local churches or various community groups; the relation between a team and fans), while also being completely consumed by money, capital, and the dissolution and alienation of social life.

Taken together, the episodes will lay out the entirety of Heidegger project for people who are curious, serious and interested, but who simply don't have the time to sit down and read the 437 densely-written pages of the book.

It is our hope that this series will show how Heidegger's thinking might be applied to one's life in ways which are illuminating, elevating and beneficial.

Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts (Yale University Press, 2021) This volume brings together thirty-five essays, originally published in The New York Times, on a wide range of topics, from the dimensions of Plato's academy and the mysteries of Eleusis to Philip K. Dick, Mormonism, money, and the joy and pain of Liverpool Football Club fans.

Contributions have included such thinkers as Linda Martín Alcoff, Seyla Benhabib, Gary Gutting, Philip Kitcher, Chris Lebron, Todd May, Jason Stanley, Peter Singer, and many others.

They have released four albums: Humiliation (2004); The Majesty of the Absurd (2014); Ponders End (2017); and Moderate or Good, Occasionally Poor (2017).