Tag: Philosophy
-
Silicon Valley, Techno-Authoritarianism, and the Growing Challenge to American Democracy
Gil Durán, a longtime journalist and former editorial-page editor at the San Francisco Examiner and opinion editor at The Sacramento Bee, argues that a network of wealthy technology entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and intellectuals has acquired growing influence over American politics while promoting ideas that challenge conventional liberal-democratic institutions. In his book The Nerd Reich: Silicon…
-
A Very Short Introduction to the French Revolution (Audio)
The French Revolution survives in cultural memory through the literary refractions of Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, Baroness Orczy in The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Tolstoy in the Napoleonic aftermath that haunts War and Peace, as well as through the half-remembered iconography of tricolor cockades, the Phrygian bonnets of the sansculottes, and the apocryphal…
-
‘For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor’ by Slavoj Žižek
For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor by Slavoj Žižek is a dazzling interrogation of ideology, enjoyment, and the political deadlocks of modernity. In this monumental work, Žižek builds upon a provocative premise: the combination of ignorance and enjoyment is not merely incidental to ideological discourse but is foundational to…
-
Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France | 2 Volumes
In these two volumes, drawn together under the common title Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, a rich panorama of philosophical exchange emerges, one that gently but decisively overturns many entrenched perspectives on the reception of German Idealism. From the outset, the books proclaim a sweeping project: they place before our eyes the overlooked…
-
The Negative of Capital: The Marxian Concept of Economic Crisis
In The Negative of Capital: The Marxian Concept of Economic Crisis, Jorge Grespan undertakes an extraordinary examination of the concept of crisis as developed in Karl Marx’s Capital and its preparatory manuscripts. Rather than treating crises as isolated, incidental phenomena, Grespan reorients the discussion by positing crisis as the very negative of the concept of…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger
The volume Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger, edited by Rebecca Comay and John McCumber and published by SUNY Press in 1999, gathers a constellation of essays that together stage one of the most demanding conversations in twentieth-century continental thought The book does not propose a survey of where Hegel and Heidegger agree…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
‘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…
-
Frankenstein, oder, Der moderne Prometheus
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelleys Roman Frankenstein, oder der moderne Prometheus, hier in der deutschen Übertragung Friedrich Polakovics’ (Carl Hanser Verlag, München 1970) zugänglich, stellt eine der eigentümlichsten Problemkonstellationen dar, die die europäische Romantik hervorgebracht hat: Er befragt nicht allein die Grenzen naturwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis und die Verantwortlichkeit des schöpferischen Subjekts, sondern erprobt an einem konstruierten Extremfall, was…
-
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…
-
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899; revised for book publication 1902) poses with compressed precision a question that refuses easy resolution: whether the categories through which European civilization understands itself — progress, idealism, civilization, moral purpose — are constitutively dependent upon the very violence they profess to redeem. The novella’s governing ambition is not to…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
