Category: Philosophy
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‘In Defense of Lost Causes’ by Slavoj Žižek
In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek is a sweeping philosophical manifesto that boldly confronts the prevailing liberal-democratic consensus, advocating for a re-engagement with radical politics and the revolutionary ideals of the past. Žižek’s work is both a critical examination and a daring re-evaluation of historical totalitarian movements, aiming to uncover and revitalize their…
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G. K. Chesterton’ Orthodoxy
Chesterton’ Orthodoxy presents itself as an intellectual experiment whose distinctive contribution lies in demonstrating, by autobiographical method and argumentative pressure, that classical Christian doctrine functions as a methodological key for holding together experiences that otherwise disintegrate into skepticism, sentimentality, or fanaticism. Its scholarly stake is to exhibit how a determinate creed—summarized by the Apostles’ Creed—does…
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Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion
Walter Jaeschke’s Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion stakes a precise claim: it reconstructs, with philological rigor and systematic intent, how Hegel regrounds the very possibility of a philosophy of religion by reopening the question that Kant appeared to close—whether speculative reason can know God—and by tracking how that reopening reshapes…
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‘Five Lessons on Wagner’ by Alain Badiou
Five Lessons on Wagner presents a philosopher’s rigorous attempt to re-situate Wagner within the field where aesthetics, ideology, and method intersect. Badiou’s wager is that Wagner is less a historical composer to be judged by posterior moral verdicts than a recurrent operator that allows philosophy to test its own concepts—identity, myth, totalization, continuity, and subject—under…
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Wagner and Philosophy
Wagner and Philosophy is Bryan Magee’s sustained attempt to reconstruct, with maximal conceptual clarity and textual sobriety, the conditions under which Wagner’s artistic self-understanding and compositional practice took shape in conversation with the philosophical movements of his age. Its distinctive contribution lies in entwining an exposition of Wagner’s major music dramas with a carefully delimited…
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The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality
The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality stakes a precise claim in the crowded field of voice studies: it recenters inquiry on voices as sensuous, technical, and historically situated phenomena while keeping in view psychoanalytic accounts of vocal excess and desire. The book’s distinctive contribution is a method of double illumination: raising the light…
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Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity
Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity secures a distinctive place in the literature because it compresses a complete conceptual itinerary—from classical kinematics to the relativistic unification of gravitation and geometry—into a set of lectures whose unity of method is continuously tested and amended across successive editions. The book’s scholarly stake is double: first, it re-derives the…
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‘Essays on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Values and the Will of Life’ by Christopher Janaway
Christopher Janaway’s Essays on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Values and the Will of Life advances a precise scholarly stake: it shows, across fourteen carefully argued studies, how Schopenhauer’s conception of will to life and Nietzsche’s critique and revaluation of values intersect at the level of first-order psychological explanation, second-order evaluative grammar, and the conditions of aesthetic…
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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.…
Simon Gros 