Tag: dialectic
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Marx’s Not-Capital: Labour and the Contemporary Critique of Political Economy
Benjamin Tetler’s Marx’s Not-Capital: Labour and the Contemporary Critique of Political Economy stakes a precise claim within Marx scholarship: the recovery, systematization, and methodological testing of Marx’s scattered determinations of labour as not-capital and value as not-value, drawn from the preparatory manuscripts to Capital, in order to reorient critique away from the affirmation of labour…
S. Gros
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The Methods of Metaphilosophy: Kant, Maimon, and Schelling on How to Philosophize About Philosophy
The Methods of Metaphilosophy advances a precise and ambitious scholarly stake: to show that Kant, Maimon, and Schelling each devise a method for philosophizing about philosophy that treats metaphilosophy as first philosophy and, crucially, as a discipline with its own experimentally inflected procedure. Schmid’s distinctive contribution lies in the reconstruction of a shared research programme—metaphilosophy-first—whose…
S. Gros
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The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza’s Philosophy: The God-Intoxicated Heretic
Yuval Jobani’s The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza’s Philosophy: The God-Intoxicated Heretic reframes the canonical image of Spinoza’s seamless Euclidean rationalism by arguing, with relentless textual attention, that contradiction is neither an embarrassment to be harmonized away nor an exoteric smokescreen, but a constitutive motor of Spinoza’s project—governing the political architecture of revised religion in…
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Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution
Rebecca Comay’s Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution stakes a precise claim: that the philosophical architecture of German Idealism, and Hegel’s in particular, bears the imprint of a revolution experienced at once intimately and vicariously, as an event whose terror and promise were registered in Germany through displacement, delay, and symptomatic re-enactment. Its distinctive…
S. Gros
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Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy
The distinctive scholarly stake of Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy lies in its reconstruction—through first-time English translations and a programmatic editorial introduction—of the earliest, empiricist-leaning attempts to read, resist, and retool the Critique of Pure Reason between 1781 and 1789. Sassen’s contribution is not merely curatorial. By arranging reviews, essays,…
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Marxian Totality: Inverting Hegel to Expound Worldly Matters
The declared ambition of Marxian Totality: Inverting Hegel to Expound Worldly Matters is methodological before it is doctrinal. Its opening gesture situates the project in a landscape where Marx’s intellectual preeminence sits uneasily alongside theoretical disarray on the Left; from this discrepancy Boveiri extracts a single wager: that clarity about totality—what it is, how it…
S. Gros
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Complicated Presence: Heidegger and the Postmetaphysical Unity of Being
Backman’s Complicated Presence advances a precise and audacious claim: the thread that binds Heidegger’s itinerary from his earliest lecture courses through the texts of the Kehre and the late meditations is a single, rigorously reworked question—how unity holds for being once the metaphysical will to a final ground, system, or identity has exhausted itself. The…
S. Gros
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The Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a book that resists every straightforward description while obliging the reader to submit to its singular logic of unfolding, a logic that moves neither by pure exposition nor by narrative in the ordinary sense, but by a methodical, internally impelled transition through shapes of consciousness that are at once lived…
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817)
DOWNLOAD: (.pdf, draft) GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGELENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES IN OUTLINE(1817) Preface The need to place a guiding thread into the hands of my listeners for my philosophical lectures is the immediate reason that I let this overview of the entire scope of philosophy appear earlier than I had otherwise intended. The nature…
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‘Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism’ by Slavoj Žižek
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism presents itself less as a commentary redundantly installed upon the edifice of German Idealism than as the staging ground for an experiment in the conditions of thinking when the ground itself is withdrawn. The book’s wager holds that the only way to register the philosophical…
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Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency
Christopher Yeomans’ Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency can be read as a sustained attempt to retrieve the problem of free will for Hegel by relocating it within the conceptual architecture of the Science of Logic. The guiding wager is that Hegel’s distinctive treatment of freedom—as an achievement of self-determination that simultaneously…
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Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency
Allen Speight’s Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency can be approached as a rigorous attempt to recover the inner architecture of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by taking at face value what many readers have treated as merely ornamental: Hegel’s insistent, even obstinate, recourse to literature at decisive junctures of the argument. The wager is…
S. Gros
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Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life
Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life by Robert B. Pippin can be read as an exacting reconstruction of a simple but disconcerting thesis: there is no intelligible way to describe free human action that does not already presuppose a social form of mindedness within which agents hold one another to account. In Pippin’s…
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Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason
Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason appears, by its title, to submit to a Kantian discipline it simultaneously resists. The borrowed syntagm—Critique of … Reason—signals continuity with the most canonical genre of modern philosophy, yet in Sloterdijk’s hands it functions less as homage than as strategic détournement. The allusion is a gesture, not a pledge:…
S. Gros
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‘Zero Point’ by Slavoj Žižek
The title announces a limit-experience and a method at once. Zero point here names neither a melodramatic terminus nor the consoling trough before an inevitable rebound; it names the station where the fantasy of uninterrupted progress collapses, and the temptation to disavow collapse by acting out — in moralistic fury or cynical resignation — is…
S. Gros
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Predication and Genesis: Metaphysics as Fundamental Heuristic after Schelling’s ‘The Ages of the World’
Wolfram Hogrebe’s Predication and Genesis: Metaphysics as Fundamental Heuristic after Schelling’s The Ages of the World appears, in its English incarnation, as a work whose object is nothing less than to teach contemporary philosophy to hear again what it no longer quite knows how to ask: by what pre-predicative tumult does a world attain to…
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Sometimes, We Are Eternal
Sometimes, We Are Eternal presents itself less as a tidy primer than as a deliberately knotted threshold to a system that aspires, paradoxically, to clarity about the very conditions under which clarity becomes possible. The volume gathers three compact but far-ranging seminars in which Alain Badiou retraces and tests the arc of the Being and…
S. Gros
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Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates is a small book with an outsized philosophical voltage, a compact intervention whose density is not an ornament but a method. What begins as a meditation on a single historical rupture is exposed as a laboratory for testing the internal…
S. Gros
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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…
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The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form and Matter
James Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel is a monumental philosophical text that renders the elusive details of Hegelian thought intelligible to the English-speaking reader, while simultaneously preserving the dense, challenging fabric of Hegel’s own language. Stirling’s work is a formidable mediation between the obtuse lexicon of Hegelian German and the prevailing intellectual climate of…
S. Gros
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Jacques Lacan’s The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis
In Lacan’s The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, one encounters a work that is at once a return to Freud’s original texts and an unprecedented venture into the very conditions that shape the analytic encounter. This book exists in a space where French philosophical thought, Freudian psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and…
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Collapse without Sovereignty: Reading History through Quantum Ontology and Hegelian Negativity in Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Politics
A certain relief, in Slavoj Žižek’s view, announces itself at the outset, not in the content of a new doctrine but in the fact that one can still form, across disciplines that typically repel one another, an honest connection. To approach quantum theory as ontology rather than a mere computational apparatus, and to bring its…
S. Gros
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A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: II. Negation & Reflection
Deng Xiaomang’s A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics II: Negation and Reflection presents itself as a treatise on the inner motor and the expressive articulation of Hegel’s system: negativity as the soul of movement and reflection as the form that renders that movement intelligible to itself. In this second volume of a projected triptych, Deng…
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A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: I. Origin & Beginning
Deng Xiaomang’s A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: I. Origin & Beginning appears, at first contact, to be a compact treatise on a familiar question in Hegel studies—the problem of how the system must begin and with what—but its distinctive contribution lies in the way it binds that question to an archeology of dialectic whose…
S. Gros
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Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic: Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory in the United States
Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom Dialectic: Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory in the United States is a closely argued reconstruction of a problem that is at once conceptual and historical: how the Hegelian dialectic of necessity and freedom is taken up, transformed, and made socially determinate within Marx’s critique of political economy—and how that…
S. Gros
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Hegel for Social Movements
Andy Blunden’s Hegel for Social Movements is a sustained attempt to re-situate Hegel’s system where it can do the most living work: in the intelligibility of collective action, the normative structure of practices, and the metamorphoses of concepts as they are enacted, contested, and institutionalized across the arc of social struggles. Its guiding wager is…
S. Gros
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‘Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin’ by C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin presents itself less as a commentary on a fixed philosophical canon than as an extended exercise in the practice of dialectical cognition, a strenuous attempt to think the historical movement of the laboring masses and their forms of organization as the living content from which philosophical categories…
S. Gros
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‘Hegel: Three Studies’ by Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies arrives in English as a carefully structured intervention into the legacy of German Idealism and into the present of critical theory. Appearing in the MIT Press translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, with an introduction by Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro, the volume collects three essays—“Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” “The…
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Žizek’s Œuvre, Over and Over
Slavoj Žižek appears at once amused and wary as he confronts a journal issue devoted to his own corpus, a sentiment that sets the scene for a compact yet many-layered exchange with the editors and podcast hosts Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza. He confesses to postponing a close reading out of a characteristic fear of…
S. Gros
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Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians
Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians is a rigorous, architectonic reconstruction of a philosophical problem that remains decisive for any contemporary science of society: how to read Capital as a positive, apodictic demonstration rather than as an echo chamber of Hegelian negation. Nick Nesbitt stages this reconstruction with an unusual clarity of…
S. Gros
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The Hegel-Marx Connection
The Hegel–Marx Connection, edited by Tony Burns and Ian Fraser, is a rigorously composed, richly argued, and conceptually expansive inquiry into one of the most enduring and difficult problems in modern social and political thought: how Hegel’s speculative system and dialectical logic were taken up, inverted, preserved, and transformed within Marxist theory. The volume rejects…
S. Gros
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Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State
Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State is a landmark work in the interpretation of Hegel’s political philosophy, not only because it offers a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of Hegel’s political thought across his entire career, but also because it succeeds in dissolving the long-standing caricatures of Hegel as either a rigid apologist…
S. Gros
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Meditations on First Philosophy: with Selections from the Objections and Replies
This new translation of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, enriched by carefully chosen selections from the Objections and Replies, is both a rigorous philosophical challenge and a historical masterpiece that continues to captivate serious readers of Western thought. It carries the full texts of the Third and Fourth Objections and Replies, alongside a judicious selection…
S. Gros
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The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
This book is a journey into one of the most transformative eras in the history of modern thought, a thorough chronicle that illuminates the turbulent passage of German philosophy between the publication of Kant’s first Critique and Fichte’s early Wissenschaftslehre. It is presented with an extraordinary depth of research that captures the uncertainty and the…
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Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality
Eric Watkins’s Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality presents a uniquely thorough and philosophically substantial account of how the architectonic structure of eighteenth-century German thought shaped Kant’s understanding of the causal principles that undergird the fabric of experience. The work does not merely highlight the ways in which Kant responded to a single empiricist challenge…
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A Dialectic for Our Age: Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel Unbound
Slavoj Žižek, in his contribution to the Experts on Hegel series, offers a radical, nuanced, and deeply contemporary reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophical legacy, refusing to reduce Hegel to a relic of a bygone metaphysical age. Rather than enshrining him as a completed thinker whose system can be memorized and repeated, Žižek insists…
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Dialectic Or Difference? Spinoza & Hegel On Individuation Between Thinking And Being
Kerstin Andermann, speaking at the conference in Leuven, addresses the longstanding tension between Baruch Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on the question of how individuality arises from a unified reality. She shows that Hegel’s interpretation reduces Spinoza’s complex framework to what Hegel calls an “oriental unity” of nature, reality, and subjectivity, culminating in a…
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Inversion of Nature and Negation of Negation in Spinoza
Anne Texier, speaking at the conference on Spinoza and Negativity at KU Leuven, offers a thorough exposition of the ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy can be understood as involving both an “inversion of nature” and a “negation of negation.” Although Spinoza’s metaphysics is commonly described as an ontology of positivity, there are numerous instances in…
S. Gros
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Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza: A Study in German Idealism, 1801–1831
George di Giovanni’s Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza offers a deep engagement with one of the most formidable and abiding tensions in post-Kantian thought: the confrontation between Hegel’s developing metaphysics and the legacy of Spinoza’s monism. The book unfolds within the historical and philosophical ambiance of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German Idealism, a…
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Gadamer and the Transmission of History
Jerome Veith’s Gadamer and the Transmission of History offers a sweeping and philosophically charged exploration of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s thought, illuminating how Gadamer’s hermeneutics redefines our collective and individual engagements with the past. In this deeply researched study, Veith moves beyond conventional expositions of Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method, by showing how the entire arc…
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‘Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics’ by Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is a forceful excursion into the fundamental principles of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, yet it is also a resolute turning point within Heidegger’s own philosophical journey after the publication of Being and Time. First appearing in 1929 and later forming volume 3 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe,…
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Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism
Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism is an analysis of a moment in intellectual history when the forces of modernity, with their insistence on immanence and the rigorous demands of critical reason, collided with an enduring, though often obscured, tradition of transcendent realism rooted in both…
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The Ages of the World (1815)
The Ages of the World (1815) by F. W. J. Schelling is a profound, sprawling, and intricate philosophical masterpiece that wrestles with some of the most elusive and challenging concepts in metaphysics, theology, and the philosophy of time. It is a philosophical narrative and poetic speculation that unfolds the genesis of the cosmos, the divine,…
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Law and Violence in Hegel: Hegel-Studien, 57
The Hegel Studies (Volume 57) offers a comprehensive examination of Hegel’s philosophical perspectives on law, violence, and freedom, showcasing their relevance to contemporary legal and ethical questions. Edited by Christoph Menke and Benno Zabel, the volume includes contributions from Jean-François Kervégan, Ana María Miranda Mora, and Christian Schmidt. These scholars delve into how Hegel’s work…
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Before and after Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel’s Thought
Tom Rockmore’s Before and After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel’s Thought is a philosophically rich, historically embedded, and methodologically nuanced exploration of the philosophical currents that coalesce in the system of G.W.F. Hegel. This book transcends the narrow confines of systematic introductions, offering instead a sophisticated conceptual map that situates Hegel within the grand…
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Hegel: An Intellectual Biography
Horst Althaus’ Hegel: An Intellectual Biography, as translated by Michael Tarsh, explores the life and evolving thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, offering a comprehensive and deeply detailed intellectual history that for a long time served as the definitive biographical work on the enigmatic philosopher. Unlike the sporadic and often outdated accounts from the nineteenth…
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Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom
Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom by Klaus Vieweg is not merely a biography of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the architect of German idealism, but a philosophical investigation into the life, thought, and historical significance of one of modernity’s most enigmatic thinkers. Klaus Vieweg’s work offers a well researched and vividly narrated account that challenges conventional…
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Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution
Jon Stewart’s Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution represents a detailed and philosophically rigorous exploration of how G. W. F. Hegel’s thought shaped the intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century. In an era marked by immense upheaval—political revolutions, burgeoning nationalism, industrial transformation, and religious crisis—Hegel’s categories of “alienation” and “recognition” served…
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Freedom, in Context: Time, History, and Necessity in Hegel
Freedom, in Context: Time, History, and Necessity in Hegel by Borna Radnik offers an extraordinarily comprehensive rethinking of Hegelian freedom in light of our most urgent contemporary contexts, while engaging the full breadth of Hegel’s logical, historical, and ontological framework. In a work that draws together classical German philosophy and twenty-first-century social struggles, Radnik proposes…
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The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802)
In The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling, editors Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood offer an unparalleled entry point into the contentious and transformative relationship between two of post-Kantian philosophy’s towering figures: Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. This carefully curated volume not only illuminates the intellectual trajectories of these thinkers…
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