Tag: history
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Hegel’s Political Writings: On The English Reform Bill
The volume gathered by Lawrence Dickey and H. B. Nisbet under the title Political Writings in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series presents eight pieces by Hegel composed between his Tübingen youth and the final months before his death in November 1831. Its governing question is how a rational political order…
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Hegel in Vienna: A Lecture Series on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right at the Vienna Juridicum
Hegel in Wien: Eine Ringvorlesung zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie am Wiener Juridicum, Edited by Linda Lilith Obermayr and Alexander Somek (Verlag Österreich, Vienna, 2023) gathers twelve essays drawn from a winter-semester lecture cycle held at the Vienna Faculty of Law in 2021/22, augmented by contributions from a concluding January workshop and one essay on the state…
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Hegel, Marx, and the Laughing Matter of Spirit
Rachel A. Aumiller’s Hegel, Marx, and the Laughing Matter of Spirit takes as its central concern the dramaturgical interpretation of Hegelian negativity, asking what becomes of dialectic when its guiding category is the crack — translated variably as split, gap, rupture, slit, cleavage — rendered as the protagonist of a politically charged comic narrative. The…
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Philosophy of Right: Reconstitution (Audiobook Preparation)
Preface One hears, even from those who appear most intent on taking philosophy seriously, the familiar refrain that form is something external, indifferent to the matter itself, and that everything depends only on the “thing” or “content.” One further hears the vocation of the writer—especially the philosophical writer—defined as the discovery of truths, the stating…
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Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic
Catherine Malabou’s L’Avenir de Hegel, presented here in Lisabeth During’s English version under the title The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, asks one question with an unwavering steadiness: whether the philosophy of Hegel has a future, both in the sense of a posterity and in the sense of a futurity inscribed within its…
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Kant and the Problem of Nothingness: A Latin American Study and Critique
Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla’s Kant and the Problem of Nothingness, recently translated into English by Addison Ellis, marks a pivotal recovery of a neglected yet profoundly original philosophical voice from Latin America. Originally published in 1965, Mayz Vallenilla’s text undertakes a systematic investigation of the concept of nothing (nada) within the architecture of Kant’s Critique of…
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Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III: The Consummate Religion
Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III: The Consummate Religion, edited by Peter C. Hodgson, stands as a monumental contribution to the understanding of Hegel’s philosophical system and its implications for theology, spirituality, and the nature of consciousness. This volume encapsulates the culmination of Hegel’s reflections on religion, in which he articulates his…
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‘The Art of Being Right’ by Arthur Schopenhauer
The Art of Being Right organizes itself around a compact and unusually exact question: what, in actual dispute, enables a speaker to maintain a position irrespective of its objective truth, and how may that practical knowledge be rendered explicit without being confused with logic proper. Its governing ambition is taxonomic and diagnostic at once. It…
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Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792 and here read in its second edition as presented in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series edited by Sylvana Tomaselli, is one of the most consequential and philosophically ambitious texts in the history of European moral and political…
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The Architecture of Wartime Legitimacy and the Grammar of Resolute Power
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Statement is a compact but highly concentrated example of executive war rhetoric operating simultaneously on several planes: operational reporting, retrospective self-justification, national mobilization, regional signaling, alliance maintenance, and regime-directed psychological messaging. As an object of study, its interest lies less in the novelty of any single proposition than in the way…
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Reza Pahlavi on the future of Iran
In a televised interview broadcast by 60 Minutes, Reza Pahlavi, one of the most prominent opponents of the Islamic Republic of Iran, set out his view of the country’s immediate political future amid a period of extreme military escalation and internal instability. Speaking from Paris, Pahlavi argued that the Iranian system of government is entering…
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Operation Epic Fury Update, U.S. President Donald J. Trump
Operation Epic Fury Update, President Donald J. Trump is a notably concentrated specimen of executive war speech whose importance lies less in the disclosure of operational detail than in the way it organizes political reality into a sequence of authorizations. The address constructs a compact but internally differentiated field composed of military action, bereavement, moral…
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Legitimacy Under Fire: France, International Law, and the Politics of Collective Defense in the Iran Escalation
The press conference delivered by Jean-Noël Barrot under the title “WATCH FULL PRESSER: French FM Jean-Noël Barrot Holds Crisis News Conference on Iran Tensions | AC14,” disseminated by DWS News, presents itself as an urgent governmental act of clarification amid escalating hostilities in the Middle East. Its central problem-space is the juridical and strategic positioning…
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Žižek’s Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed
Žižek’s Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed presents itself, with unusual explicitness, as an ontology of the present articulated through a conjunctural relay among Marx, Freud/Lacan, and a final political wager on subjective destitution, while Hegel operates as the recurrent formal intelligence that makes the relay legible without becoming the declared object of exposition. The…
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Executive Legitimacy Under Mediation: A Critical Description of Tom Llamas’s Oval Office Interview with President Trump
The extended Oval Office interview between Tom Llamas and President Donald Trump can be read as a carefully staged exercise in public reasoning whose governing problem-space is the relation between state force and public legitimacy under conditions of polarization, distrust in institutions, and compressed media time. Its distinctive value as an object of study lies…
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Žižek’s Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy
Žižek’s Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy stakes its claim on a double front: the book’s central question concerns what becomes of materialism once quantum theory is taken as a determinate constraint on ontology rather than as a merely technical calculus, and how this ontological constraint rebounds onto the intelligibility of history, agency, and political…
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Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography
Free, Melania develops a sustained inquiry into how a public figure can be simultaneously hyper-visible and structurally unknowable, and how a biographical account can remain evidentially responsible under such conditions. Its governing ambition is to reconstruct Melania Trump’s practical agency—within marriage, media, and the institutional architecture of the first lady’s office—without dissolving that agency into…
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The Discipline of Civilization: Sloterdijk on Domestication, Spheres, Europe, and Philosophical Distance
In the provided interview-documentary philosophy is treated less as a storehouse of doctrines than as a contested social function: a practice that owes an account of its utility, its authority, and its freedom under modern conditions. Within a carefully edited alternation of interviewer prompts, narrated contextualization, and Sloterdijk’s own self-characterizations, the film constructs a description…
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The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free
At the center of The War on Warriors lies a problem that is neither narrowly political nor merely institutional but existential: the degradation of the very principle by which a republic sustains the moral and functional distinction between those who defend it and those who are defended by it. The book examines the dissolution of…
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Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature analyses the historical constitution of “modern literature” by treating it as an institutional and epistemic formation whose apparent self-evidence is produced through determinate operations of perception, language, and social organization. Karatani’s distinctive contribution is in a method that reconstructs “origins” as effects of inversion: the modern system retroactively posits the…
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From Stanford to Harvard: Campus Conflict as a Proxy for Civilizational Legitimacy
At the inaugural Conservative and Republican Student Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peter Thiel—introduced by the host as a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor—used his keynote to revisit a set of campus conflicts from his years as a Stanford student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that those disputes anticipated larger and more enduring…
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The University Against the Future: Peter Thiel on Stagnation, Risk, and the Return of Total Control
At a Stanford Academic Freedom Conference in early November 2022, Peter Thiel was introduced by Stanford faculty member Russell Berman as a technology entrepreneur and investor with an unusually visible public profile, associated with PayPal, Palantir, Founders Fund, and early involvement in Facebook. Berman situated Thiel’s presence within a longer arc of campus controversies and…
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The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State offers a rare, methodically reported, philosophically alert portrait of a firm whose practical vocation consists in rendering heterogeneous worlds legible to power. Its contribution lies in treating Palantir’s rise neither as a purely technical success story nor as…
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Peter Thiel at Cambridge Union
Peter Thiel appeared at the Cambridge Union on May 8, 2024, for a talk and extended discussion that combined institutional critique, political economy, and a characteristic skepticism toward fashionable explanatory frames. Speaking as a technology entrepreneur and investor—known for co-founding PayPal and Palantir and for early involvement with Facebook—Thiel used the setting to revisit arguments…
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Hegel’s World Revolutions
Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions claims that Hegel’s historical and political philosophy yields its central diagnostics only when reconstructed through the sequence of revolutions that, in Hegel’s account, generate modern freedom while repeatedly placing it at risk. Bourke’s distinctive contribution lies in combining source-driven intellectual history with conceptual analysis in order to reinsert Hegel into…
Simon Gros 