Category: Philosophy
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Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
Simmel’s Schopenhauer and Nietzsche advances a precise and programmatic claim: by staging a double inquiry into pessimism and exuberant moralism as temperaments that crystallize into systems, Simmel demonstrates how philosophy of life becomes a diagnostic instrument for the modern crisis of meaning, while also exposing the intrinsic antinomies that any such instrument generates. The distinctive…
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The Dark Enlightenment
Nick Land’s The Dark Enlightenment enters the scene as a document of cold lucidity and nocturnal exactness, neither sermon nor simple polemic, but a protracted autopsy of the Enlightenment’s living corpus carried out under artificial light. What appears at first as a blog-born accumulation of interventions arranges itself—once read with patience and method—into a single,…
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Arthur Schopenhauer: On Human Nature. Essays in Ethics and Politics.
The volume presents a compact yet rigorous dossier of Schopenhauer’s practical philosophy, organized around the claim that any faithful account of ethics and politics must begin from the primacy of willing over knowing, and then track how this primacy complicates received distinctions between freedom and necessity, character and conduct, conscience and honor, justice and the…
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Essays & Aphorisms by Arnold Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer’s Essays & Aphorisms, gathered here through the historically layered work of Mrs. Rudolf Dircks, R. J. Hollingdale, T. Bailey Saunders, R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, presents a deliberately fragmentary architecture through which its author prosecutes a continuous metaphysical claim: that the world given in experience is a representation conditioned by intellect, while the…
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The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
Scholarly treatments of Schopenhauer often oscillate between exegesis of a brilliant but wayward metaphysician and polemic against a corrosive pessimist; Dale Jacquette’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer stakes a more difficult and therefore more valuable claim. It reconstructs Schopenhauer’s system as an interconnected economy of concepts in which epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, science, and religion…
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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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‘Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music’ by Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno’s Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music advances a project as exacting as it is audacious: to reconstruct Beethoven’s music as a determinate mode of thought whose inner formal tensions both register and adjudicate the historical experience of a society moving toward rationalized totality. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in the way it treats musical material…
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Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life
Andreja Novakovic’s Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life isolates, with unusual precision, a single hinge in Hegel’s practical philosophy and turns the whole edifice on it: the claim that subjective freedom is best realized when ethical norms have sedimented as second nature, such that agents inhabit a rational order without the friction of perpetual…
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Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism
This volume advances a precise and austere scholarly stake: it offers the first sustained, plural, and text-grounded assessment of how the anti-Jewish remarks in the Black Notebooks intersect with, and in key passages are articulated from within, Heidegger’s being-historical project. Under the editorship of Andrew J. Mitchell and Peter Trawny, it refuses the disjunction between…
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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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‘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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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…