Tag: books
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The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time
Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time is less a commentary than a topographical and documentary reconstruction of the pathway whose precipices and detours led to Sein und Zeit. A work written under the constraint that a philosophy which avowedly privileges the temporally unfolding situation of questioning cannot be explained by a static…
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‘Contributions to Philosophy of the Event’ by Martin Heidegger
This work stands at the turbulent crossroads of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical “turning,” composed in a hidden stretch of years when he sought anew the question of what it means for being to happen as event rather than to endure as a fixed entity. In the intensity of these private meditations, which were once never intended…
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The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Lea Ypi’s The Architectonic of Reason isolates and restores a neglected nerve of the Critique of Pure Reason: the Doctrine of Method’s culminating section on architectonic unity. Its precise scholarly stake is to show how Kant’s system requires a transcendental principle of purposiveness to integrate theoretical and practical uses of reason, and to explain why…
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‘The Art of Literature’ by Arthur Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer’s The Art of Literature advances a stringent, programmatic account of writing in which the value of literature is indexed to the purity of its cognitive aim and to the discipline with which style renders thought visible. The volume’s distinctive contribution is twofold: first, it binds the praxis of authorship to a normative anthropology—of learning,…
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Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials
The distinctive stake of Eric Watkins’ Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials lies in turning the problem of “Kant’s context” from a diffuse generality into a precise, source-based field in which the semantic, methodological, and polemical options recognized by Kant’s German readership can be reconstructed from the inside. The volume does this by…
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The Methods of Metaphilosophy: Kant, Maimon, and Schelling on How to Philosophize About Philosophy
The Methods of Metaphilosophy advances a precise and ambitious scholarly stake: to show that Kant, Maimon, and Schelling each devise a method for philosophizing about philosophy that treats metaphilosophy as first philosophy and, crucially, as a discipline with its own experimentally inflected procedure. Schmid’s distinctive contribution lies in the reconstruction of a shared research programme—metaphilosophy-first—whose…
S. Gros
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The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza’s Philosophy: The God-Intoxicated Heretic
Yuval Jobani’s The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza’s Philosophy: The God-Intoxicated Heretic reframes the canonical image of Spinoza’s seamless Euclidean rationalism by arguing, with relentless textual attention, that contradiction is neither an embarrassment to be harmonized away nor an exoteric smokescreen, but a constitutive motor of Spinoza’s project—governing the political architecture of revised religion in…
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Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy
The distinction of Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy lies in its reconstruction—through first-time English translations and a programmatic editorial introduction—of the earliest, empiricist-leaning attempts to read, resist, and retool the Critique of Pure Reason between 1781 and 1789. Sassen’s scholarly stake is not merely curatorial. By arranging reviews, essays, and…
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The Wagnerian Sublime: Four Lacanian Readings of Classic Operas
Žižek’s The Wagnerian Sublime: Four Lacanian Readings of Classic Operas stakes a precise claim: that opera’s most persistent scenes of longing, blockage, and impossible union are not melodramatic ornaments but analytic diagrams of desire’s economy, and that music—the privileged bearer of an inner “truth”—stages the objectless insistence of drive more rigorously than narrative ever can.…
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Philosophical Book Review: Chasing Homer: Good Luck, and Nothing Else: Odysseus’s Cave
This book stages a controlled experiment in narrative pressure and philological memory. László Krasznahorkai compresses a pursuit story into a sequence of conceptual modules—Velocity, Faces, Relating to sheltered places, and so on—whose cumulative claim is that survival, once reduced to method, becomes a cognitive discipline that interrogates its own premises. The distinctive contribution lies in…
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‘Being Towards Death’: Heidegger and the Orthodox Theology of the East
“Being Towards Death”: Heidegger and the Orthodox Theology of the East embodies a far-reaching analysis of Christian theology through the existential prism of Martin Heidegger’s thought, enshrined above all in his notion of “being towards death,” while simultaneously engaging the mystical and apophatic spirit of Eastern Orthodoxy. It undertakes the formidable task of merging together…
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Complicated Presence: Heidegger and the Postmetaphysical Unity of Being
Backman’s Complicated Presence advances a precise and audacious claim: the thread that binds Heidegger’s itinerary from his earliest lecture courses through the texts of the Kehre and the late meditations is a single, rigorously reworked question—how unity holds for being once the metaphysical will to a final ground, system, or identity has exhausted itself. The…
S. Gros
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The Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a book that resists every straightforward description while obliging the reader to submit to its singular logic of unfolding, a logic that moves neither by pure exposition nor by narrative in the ordinary sense, but by a methodical, internally impelled transition through shapes of consciousness that are at once lived…
S. Gros
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817)
DOWNLOAD: (.pdf, draft) GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGELENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES IN OUTLINE(1817) Preface The need to place a guiding thread into the hands of my listeners for my philosophical lectures is the immediate reason that I let this overview of the entire scope of philosophy appear earlier than I had otherwise intended. The nature…
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‘Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism’ by Slavoj Žižek
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism presents itself less as a commentary redundantly installed upon the edifice of German Idealism than as the staging ground for an experiment in the conditions of thinking when the ground itself is withdrawn. The book’s wager holds that the only way to register the philosophical…
S. Gros
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Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life
Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life by Robert B. Pippin can be read as an exacting reconstruction of a simple but disconcerting thesis: there is no intelligible way to describe free human action that does not already presuppose a social form of mindedness within which agents hold one another to account. In Pippin’s…
S. Gros
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Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason
Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason appears, by its title, to submit to a Kantian discipline it simultaneously resists. The borrowed syntagm—Critique of … Reason—signals continuity with the most canonical genre of modern philosophy, yet in Sloterdijk’s hands it functions less as homage than as strategic détournement. The allusion is a gesture, not a pledge:…
S. Gros
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‘Zero Point’ by Slavoj Žižek
The title announces a limit-experience and a method at once. Zero point here names neither a melodramatic terminus nor the consoling trough before an inevitable rebound; it names the station where the fantasy of uninterrupted progress collapses, and the temptation to disavow collapse by acting out — in moralistic fury or cynical resignation — is…
S. Gros
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‘Against Progress’ by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress is not a conventional monograph so much as a deliberately fissured surface that refuses to heal: a collection of analytic incursions that turn the received object—“progress”—into a problem that will not stop returning as symptom, screen, and compulsion. The wager is that only a description that never quite stabilizes can meet…
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The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings
Sarah Kofman’s The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings is a disciplined reconstruction and a deliberately disconcerting defamiliarization of Freud’s scattered and chronologically asymmetrical reflections on “femininity.” It proceeds by accepting Freud’s declared interest in observation, method, and conceptual economy while patiently exposing the inner duplicities of those same appeals whenever they function as…
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‘A Century of Philosophy’ by Hans-Georg Gadamer
A Century of Philosophy is neither a mere memoir nor simply a late summa, rather it’s a deliberately refracted self-portrait by way of conversation, it exposes the inner grammar of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s thought under the pressure of historical catastrophe and intellectual dispute. It takes the shape of ten dialogues recorded in 1999–2000 between the centenarian…
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Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth
An elusive and recalcitrant conception of truth, scattered in aphorisms and mobilized as a methodological demand rather than codified as a thesis, stands at the core of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophical project. Yet Adorno never provides a canonical doctrine of truth. The interpretive risk this absence creates—between mistaking negativity for skepticism and canonizing critique into…
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Predication and Genesis: Metaphysics as Fundamental Heuristic after Schelling’s ‘The Ages of the World’
Wolfram Hogrebe’s Predication and Genesis: Metaphysics as Fundamental Heuristic after Schelling’s The Ages of the World appears, in its English incarnation, as a work whose object is nothing less than to teach contemporary philosophy to hear again what it no longer quite knows how to ask: by what pre-predicative tumult does a world attain to…
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Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
The provocation of Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle is announced in its title, and the title in turn is anchored in the old Freudian joke that stages denial by multiplication rather than refutation: I never borrowed your kettle; I returned it unbroken; it was already broken when I borrowed it. The enumeration negates nothing; it confesses…
S. Gros
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Sometimes, We Are Eternal
Sometimes, We Are Eternal presents itself less as a tidy primer than as a deliberately knotted threshold to a system that aspires, paradoxically, to clarity about the very conditions under which clarity becomes possible. The volume gathers three compact but far-ranging seminars in which Alain Badiou retraces and tests the arc of the Being and…
S. Gros
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Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates is a small book with an outsized philosophical voltage, a compact intervention whose density is not an ornament but a method. What begins as a meditation on a single historical rupture is exposed as a laboratory for testing the internal…
S. Gros
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Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
Slavoj Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce appears, on first approach, to be a slender intervention into the disorientation of the first post–Cold War decade, yet it insists on staging a wholesale rectification of how that decade should be named, remembered, and used. It is a book anchored in the shock of two emblematic…
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Jacques Lacan’s The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis
In Lacan’s The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, one encounters a work that is at once a return to Freud’s original texts and an unprecedented venture into the very conditions that shape the analytic encounter. This book exists in a space where French philosophical thought, Freudian psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and…
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Collapse without Sovereignty: Reading History through Quantum Ontology and Hegelian Negativity in Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Politics
A certain relief, in Slavoj Žižek’s view, announces itself at the outset, not in the content of a new doctrine but in the fact that one can still form, across disciplines that typically repel one another, an honest connection. To approach quantum theory as ontology rather than a mere computational apparatus, and to bring its…
S. Gros
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‘Political Jouissance’ by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s Political Jouissance is not a treatise that cordons enjoyment off from politics as an embarrassing excess to be evacuated in the name of sober normativity; rather, it stages the paradox that politics is already traversed by enjoyment at its very core, such that any attempt at a purely dispassionate civic rationality is itself…
S. Gros
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A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: III. The Three-Dimensional Structure
A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: III. The Three-Dimensional Structure gathers, concentrates, and then deliberately disperses the accumulated tensions of Hegel’s system by insisting that what most commentaries treat as parallel tracks—logic, epistemology, ontology—are not three separate rails but the self-differentiating planes of a single medium that folds back upon itself. Deng Xiaomang names this…
S. Gros
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A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: II. Negation & Reflection
Deng Xiaomang’s A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics II: Negation and Reflection presents itself as a treatise on the inner motor and the expressive articulation of Hegel’s system: negativity as the soul of movement and reflection as the form that renders that movement intelligible to itself. In this second volume of a projected triptych, Deng…
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A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: I. Origin & Beginning
Deng Xiaomang’s A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: I. Origin & Beginning appears, at first contact, to be a compact treatise on a familiar question in Hegel studies—the problem of how the system must begin and with what—but its distinctive contribution lies in the way it binds that question to an archeology of dialectic whose…
S. Gros
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Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: An Introduction
Michael Ure’s Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: An Introduction presents Nietzsche’s most intimate book as the staging ground for a philosophical experiment that is biographical without becoming anecdotal, therapeutic without slipping into self-help, and rigorously contextual without reducing aphorism to doctrine. Ure’s point of departure is that The Gay Science is at once a philosophical autobiography…
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Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Edited Anthology
The very premise of an edited anthology of Nietzsche’s political writings is bound to irritate habits of reading that still treat “politics” as either a contaminant to be quarantined from “culture” or a marginal afterthought to the “real” philosophical work. Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky turn that irritation into method. Their Political Writings of Friedrich…
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Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks
What Charles Bambach examines in Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks is not yet another catalogue of incriminating biographical episodes nor a gesture of apologetic compartmentalization, but a tightly wound reconstruction of a discursive field—linguistic, philological, philosophical, and political—within which Martin Heidegger’s thinking from 1933 to 1945 was composed, staged, and made to…
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The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns
D. C. Schindler’s The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns presents a sustained philosophical attempt to unseat the tacit hegemony of a merely possibilistic conception of freedom and to recover, through an exacting dialogue with Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, an account of freedom as actuality, completion, and form.…
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Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic: Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory in the United States
Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic: Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory in the United States is a closely argued reconstruction of a problem that is at once conceptual and historical: how the Hegelian dialectic of necessity and freedom is taken up, transformed, and made socially determinate within Marx’s critique of political economy—and how that…
S. Gros
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Hegel for Social Movements
Andy Blunden’s Hegel for Social Movements is a sustained attempt to re-situate Hegel’s system where it can do the most living work: in the intelligibility of collective action, the normative structure of practices, and the metamorphoses of concepts as they are enacted, contested, and institutionalized across the arc of social struggles. Its guiding wager is…
S. Gros
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‘Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin’ by C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin presents itself less as a commentary on a fixed philosophical canon than as an extended exercise in the practice of dialectical cognition, a strenuous attempt to think the historical movement of the laboring masses and their forms of organization as the living content from which philosophical categories…
S. Gros
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‘Hegel: Three Studies’ by Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies arrives in English as a carefully structured intervention into the legacy of German Idealism and into the present of critical theory. Appearing in the MIT Press translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, with an introduction by Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro, the volume collects three essays—“Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” “The…
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Žizek’s Œuvre, Over and Over
Slavoj Žižek appears at once amused and wary as he confronts a journal issue devoted to his own corpus, a sentiment that sets the scene for a compact yet many-layered exchange with the editors and podcast hosts Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza. He confesses to postponing a close reading out of a characteristic fear of…
S. Gros
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‘First Philosophy, Last Philosophy: Western Knowledge between Metaphysics and the Sciences’ by Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben’s First Philosophy, Last Philosophy: Western Knowledge between Metaphysics and the Sciences undertakes an archaeological inquiry into the very concept that once named philosophy’s primacy among the epistēmai. What appears, on the surface, as a historical reconstruction of a technical term becomes, under his method, a strategic analysis of how the West sought to…
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‘On the History of Modern Philosophy’ by F. W. J. von Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s On the History of Modern Philosophy appears, in Andrew Bowie’s lucid English translation, as both a retrospective cartography of the main line of early-modern and post-Kantian philosophy and a programmatic intervention in the fate of Idealism itself. Not a mere chronicle, the work offers a disciplined reconstruction of the inner…
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The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature
Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel is a meditation on the evolution and nature of the novel, written against the backdrop of a world on the cusp of dramatic transformation. Emerging from the intellectual milieu of Central Europe in the early 20th century—a time when Marxism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism were beginning to shape the…
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Hegel and the State
Franz Rosenzweig’s Hegel and the State (1920; first English translation 2024) is far more than an erudite study of Hegel’s political thought; it is a monumental philosophical biography, a tragic historical meditation, and an intellectual reckoning with the failure of German idealism’s promise when confronted with the realities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics. Written…
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Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State
Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State is a landmark work in the interpretation of Hegel’s political philosophy, not only because it offers a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of Hegel’s political thought across his entire career, but also because it succeeds in dissolving the long-standing caricatures of Hegel as either a rigid apologist…
S. Gros
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Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel
Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel by William Maker is an unrelenting philosophical treatise that boldly seeks to dismantle the inherited caricatures of Hegel as a metaphysical absolutist and dogmatic systematizer by rereading him through the prism of contemporary antifoundationalist critique. In a rigorous and sustained engagement with both the tradition of German Idealism and the…
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Hegel’s Philosophy Of The State And Of History: An Exposition (1902)
Hegel’s Philosophy of the State and of History: An Exposition, edited and interpreted by George Sylvester Morris, constitutes a formative landmark in the English-language reception of G.W.F. Hegel’s mature political and historical thought. Composed as part of the German Philosophical Classics for English Readers and Students series and first published in the late 19th century,…
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An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History
Stephen Houlgate’s An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History is more than a survey of one of modern philosophy’s most demanding thinkers but a comprehensive, conceptually rigorous, historically grounded, and systemically faithful reconstruction of the architecture and dynamism of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical system. More than an introduction in the superficial pedagogical sense, Houlgate’s work…
Simon Gros 