-
Žižek’s Heaven in Disorder | 天上大乱
Comrades of the interval—neither before nor after, but in the thickening middle—what follows keeps faith with a specifically 2021 mood: an in-between composition framed by emergency, written when vaccination queues braided with border queues, when lockdown routines folded into supply-chain algorithms, and when a pathogen taught political economy at scale. The temporal setting matters. Numbers,…
-
‘On Inception ’ by Martin Heidegger
On Inception does not offer itself as a book to be read and then set aside; it withholds itself as a path into a more originary beginning—Anfang—whose essence is not a point on a line but the ninality of a letting-begin. The text that English names On Inception—the translation of Über den Anfang (GA 70)—belongs…
-
📚 Donations now open again! 🕯️
I’ve reopened the donation form to support the ongoing work on my long-form reviews of classical literature. Many pieces here are living drafts—published before they’re “finished”—so that readers can use them right away and watch them improve over time. Donations help cover research time, editing, and the (often not-so-cheap) primary texts and editions I rely…
-
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature by Kojin Karatani is a work of such immense theoretical rigor and historical complexity that to engage with it is to confront not merely the history of modern Japanese literature, but the very processes by which modernity itself, both in the East and West, has been constituted. This volume occupies…
-
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…
-
Hegel and the Philosophy of Right
Dudley Knowles’ Hegel and the Philosophy of Right is one of the most sustained and philosophically rigorous engagements with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, a work that itself remains among the most complex statements of modern political philosophy. The Philosophy of Right is notorious both for its forbidding prose and for the controversies it has generated:…
-
‘Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy’ by Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy stands as one of the most decisive documents of his Marburg period, a lecture course delivered in 1926, at the very moment in which the contours of Being and Time had been brought to their sharpest formulation. While that magnum opus provides a radically new analytic of existence…
-
The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After
The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After is David Kolb’s uncompromising attempt to prise open the conceptual grammar by which modernity so often flatters and confines itself. He begins from the disquiet that “modernity” seems to demand a cruel alternative—either oppressive inheritances or an abstracted, procedural freedom—and he refuses the ultimacy of that…
-
The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany 1750-1800
Robert S. Leventhal’s The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany, 1750–1800 is a genealogy of interpretive reason at the precise historical moment when “reading” ceases to be a private virtuosity and becomes a structured practice, an institutional technology, and a self-questioning mode of historical knowledge. Published by Walter de Gruyter in…
-
Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History
To describe Frederick M. Barnard’s Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History is to chart a work that treats Johann Gottfried Herder not merely as a source of quotable slogans about Volk, language, and culture, but as an architect of a supple vision in which the formative powers of a people’s speech, memory, and art are…
-
Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology
Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology presents Herder’s lifelong wager that history becomes intelligible only when narrated as the becoming of humanity—not a thin abstraction but a living principle that binds language, climate, custom, belief, and art into a single, ever-unfinished text. The editors, Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze, organize thirty-eight selections…
-
Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches
Herder’s Essay on Being: A Translation and Critical Approaches, edited by John K. Noyes, is a landmark publication that makes accessible for the first time in English Johann Gottfried Herder’s Versuch über das Sein (Essay on Being), a youthful but philosophically decisive text from 1763–64. Long overshadowed by the commanding figure of Kant, Herder has…
-
Žižek’s Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future
Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future is Žižek at his most distilled and unflinching: a diagnosis of the present whose wager is that we can only act if we renounce the narcotic hope that action will preserve the continuity of how we live now. From the opening pages he…
-
The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions
The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions announces itself, even before the first sentence of its introduction, as a volume intent on mirroring the director’s own “double exposure” of American optimism and subterranean dread. In the editors’ opening pages, Buck Wolf’s anecdote about Lynch’s mutilated fibreglass cow—refused a place in New York’s civic…
-
Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
Peter C. Hodgson’s Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion unfolds as a sustained act of philosophical midwifery: it draws the speculative life‑blood from the critical edition of Hegel’s four Berlin lecture series (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831) and lets it circulate anew through the capillaries of contemporary theology. The book appears in tandem…
-
Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit stands as one of the twentieth century’s rare philosophical milestones, a work that both revived and reoriented an entire French understanding of Hegel’s magnum opus. Born in the ferment of pre‑World War II Paris, these lectures—delivered by Alexandre Kojève between 1933 and 1939…
-
The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right
In The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right, Paul Gottfried analyses the ideological evolution of the American conservative movement in the post-World War II era, examining an often unacknowledged debt to Hegelian philosophy within the conservative thought of key intellectual figures. Gottfried’s exploration seeks to uncover how thinkers like Will Herberg,…
-
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…
-
Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social
Marx and Hegel on the Dialectic of the Individual and the Social by Sevgi Doğan is a philosophically rigorous, politically charged, and historically grounded study that embarks on a systematic reconstruction of one of modernity’s most vexing and fundamental questions: the nature and role of the individual within the social totality. Rooted in the dialectical…
-
Hegel in Wien: Eine Ringvorlesung zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie am Wiener Juridicum
Hegel in Wien: Eine Ringvorlesung zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie am Wiener Juridicum, edited by Linda Lilith Obermayr and Alexander Somek, is a monument of commemorative and exegetical scholarship that embodies not merely a retrospective academic gesture toward the bicentennial of the first publication of Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821), but also the reactivation of the…
-
Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx
In Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, Michael Lazarus offers an unparalleled reconstruction of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism as a deeply ethical project—one whose normative depth and philosophical ambition have often been overlooked or mischaracterized. This book resolutely breaks from reductive readings of Marx as a narrowly economic thinker or an ideologue of…
-
After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism
Robert B. Pippin’s After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism is a methodologically radical philosophical intervention into the aesthetic self-understanding of modernity. It interrogates the possibility of philosophical reflection on the visual arts after the disintegration of traditional aesthetic norms, reworking the philosophical legacy of Hegel in light of the pictorial upheavals…
-
The Science of Spirit: Emergence of the New Logic
PREFACE Over the last twenty-five years, the very ground on which we conduct philosophy has been torn open and reshaped. What once seemed an immutable landscape of neat categories and settled doctrines now reveals itself as a living, breathing field of conceptual forces in continual motion. Thought has turned its gaze inward, no longer willing…
-
Žižek’s Living in the End Times
In Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek plunges us into the vertiginous space where the collapse of global capitalism converges with the apocalypse of our collective imagination. From the first pages, Žižek insists that there can be no more illusions: the “four riders of the apocalypse”—the ecological meltdown, the internal imbalances of the market…
-
Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883–1885)
Nietzsche · WorksNietzscheCollected WorksCritical Edition Edited byGiorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari Sixth DivisionVolume OneWalter de Gruyter & Co.Berlin 1968 Friedrich NietzscheThus Spoke ZarathustraA Book for All and None(1883–1885) Walter de Gruyter & Co.Berlin 1968Archive No. 3659681 © 1968 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., formerly G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung —J. Guttentag, Verlagsbuchhandlung — Georg Reimer…
-
🎧 In the Wake of Thought Now Available in Audiobook Format
Link: YouTube We are proud to announce that In the Wake of Thought: The Dialectics of Scientific Knowledge is now slowly rolling out in audiobook format. Narrated in a precise yet engaging tone that mirrors the work’s philosophical depth, this new release brings the book’s complex meditations on science, reason, and dialectical method to life.…
-
Audiobook Release: Hegel’s Works from the Gymnasium Years (1785–1788) With Footnotes
Link: YouTube Hegel’s Works from the Gymnasium Years (1785–1788), translated by Simon Gros and narrated by Leda Eliza, continues the presentation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s earliest surviving writings, following directly after Hegel’s Diary (1785–1787). Written during his final years at the Stuttgart Gymnasium and early days at the Tübingen Seminary, these texts offer a…
-
Audiobook Premiere: Hegel’s Diary (1785–1787) – Annotated and Read Aloud
Link: YouTube With Hegel’s Diary (1785–1787) now available in immersive audiobook form—complete with explanatory footnotes—you can experience the formative reflections of the young Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel anywhere, anytime.
-
Hegel’s Studies & Four Sermons (1792-1794) With Explanatory Footnotes
Table of Contents Four Sermons (1792–1793)First SermonSecond SermonThird SermonFourth Sermon Studies (1792/93–1794)In What Respect Is Religion…But the Principle Material…Our Tradition…Already in the Architecture…Religion Is One of the Most Important Matters…Aside from Oral Instruction…It Cannot Be Denied…The Constitutions of States…How Little Objective Religion…Public Authority…On the Difference in the Scene of DeathOn Objective Religion…It Would Be a…
-
Hegel’s Works from the Gymnasium Years (1785–1788) With Explanatory Footnotes
Contents: Works from the Gymnasium Years: An Essay from the Tübingen Seminary (1785–1788)Conversation Between Three PersonsSome Remarks on the Representation of MagnitudeOn the Religion of the Greeks and RomansOn Some Characteristic Differences Among the Ancient PoetsFrom a Speech Given at Graduation Upon Leaving from the GymnasiumOn Some Benefits We Gain from Reading the Classical Greek…
-
The Pure Law Within: Foundations of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals
Philosophy, in its ancient Greek articulation, was divided into three principal branches: physics, ethics, and logic. This tripartite schema is not arbitrary but corresponds intimately to the structure of human reason itself, and thus it remains a fitting and enduring classification. Little requires amendment in this scheme, save perhaps the addition of a unifying principle—one…
-
Fragment of Aristotle’s On the Ethics to Nicomachus
Dionysius Lambinus To the Most Illustrious, Most Eminent Lord Francis Turonio, of the Holy Roman Church, Cardinal, Greetings. How splendidly you shine, O most illustrious and most highly adorned Cardinal, for you unite praise and virtue—each of which, taken alone, is immensely powerful—and are all the more so when both concur in one and the…
-
The Oration of Demosthenes ‘On the Crown’
Demosthenes — On the Crown First, men of Athens, I pray to all the gods and goddesses that the goodwill I have always maintained toward the city and toward every one of you may, in this trial, be returned to me from you. Next—and this matters most for your own piety and reputation—may the gods…
-
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Early Writings I
Table of Contents Diary (1785–1787) Works from the Gymnasium Years: An Essay from the Tübingen Seminary (1785–1788)Conversation Between Three PersonsSome Remarks on the Representation of MagnitudeOn the Religion of the Greeks and RomansOn Some Characteristic Differences Among the Ancient PoetsFrom a Speech Given at Graduation from the GymnasiumOn Some Benefits We Gain from Reading the…
-
Slavoj Žižek: Rethinking the Left and Reclaiming Education in the Age of Trump
Slavoj Žižek, in his characteristically confrontational and dialectical manner, asserts that the political left has long been in a state of decline, tracing its terminal crisis to the aftermath of the events of 1968, which he provocatively labels a false liberation. Rather than achieving genuine emancipation, Žižek argues that the cultural and political upheavals of…
-
Slavoj Žižek on Trump, the Collapse of the Left, and the Transformation of American Politics
Slavoj Žižek, in his analysis of the global political situation offers a sweeping and unflinchingly critical diagnosis of the contemporary geopolitical order, locating the rise of Donald Trump not as a deviation or historical anomaly but rather as a concentrated symptom of broader, long-developing systemic failures. According to Žižek, Trump’s emergence on the political stage…
-
Žižek on Trump: The Rise of a Post-Normative Political Figure and the Crisis of Liberal Authority
Slavoj Žižek’s extended critique of Donald Trump, presented through a philosophical and psychoanalytic lens, transcends superficial political commentary and ventures into the structural and libidinal economies of contemporary liberalism. The argument Žižek builds does not merely rest upon the observation of Trump’s obscenity or populist tactics; rather, it positions Trump as the symptomatic revelation of…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Simon Gros 