While wandering through my campus library, I noticed a then-uknown-to-me author with a name currently in the news, Marjorie Greene (1910-2009). I checked out her book, A Philosophical Testament, published in 1995 when she was 85 years old (17 years after she retired). The book is very conversational, practically every other sentence has a word like, "I". Its relatively short (under 200 pages) and at an undergraduate reading level, I think. She admits her style is "chatty", and I'm not necessarily looking for a book this easy to read.

But, I love how it describes her philosophical perspective largely through describing how she came to it (although not quite chronologically). In this way, she writes about her perspective (which some call philosophy of biology), but she also gives a sort of history of philosophical education in the 1930s and of philosophical movements she was exposed to in the 1950s and 1960s. Its a bit sarcastic at times and oversimplifies works she disagrees with, but this kinda adds to its charm.

I really enjoy it, especially as the way she writes leaves a lot of room for me to see choices in emphasis and assumption that could be made differently. When I read it, I feel invited to imagine her perspective rather than demanded to agree with her conclusion (although she writes confident that she is right). She describes it as an "apologia pro philosophia sua". Its kinda like a less didactic second half of Augustine's Confessions.

So my question, what are some other "autobiographies of the philosophy of a philosopher"?