Tag: education
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‘Violence: Six Sideways Reflections’ by Slavoj Žižek
Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence. Drawing from his unique cultural vision, Žižek brings new light to the Paris riots of 2005; he questions the permissiveness of violence in philanthropy; in daring terms, he reflects on the powerful image and determination of…
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‘Totem and Taboo’ by Sigmund Freud
Widely acknowledged to be one of Freud’s greatest cultural works, when Totem and Taboo was first published in 1913, it caused outrage. Thorough and thought-provoking, Totem and Taboo remains the fullest exploration of Freud’s most famous themes. Family, society, religion – they’re all put on the couch here. Whatever your feelings about psychoanalysis, Freud’s theories have influenced every facet…
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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…
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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…
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Seditions: Heidegger and the Limit of Modernity
The title declares its method before a single argument is rehearsed. Seditions does not enlist Heidegger to prosecute modernity or recruit modernity to refute Heidegger; rather, it names a quiet but decisive departure staged by Heribert Boeder against the contemporary domestication of both Heidegger and “modernity,” a departure animated not by polemical novelty but by…
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A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: III. The Three-Dimensional Structure
A New Exploration of Hegel’s Dialectics: III. The Three-Dimensional Structure gathers, concentrates, and then deliberately disperses the accumulated tensions of Hegel’s system by insisting that what most commentaries treat as parallel tracks—logic, epistemology, ontology—are not three separate rails but the self-differentiating planes of a single medium that folds back upon itself. Deng Xiaomang names this…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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‘First Philosophy, Last Philosophy: Western Knowledge between Metaphysics and the Sciences’ by Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben’s First Philosophy, Last Philosophy: Western Knowledge between Metaphysics and the Sciences undertakes an archaeological inquiry into the very concept that once named philosophy’s primacy among the epistēmai. What appears, on the surface, as a historical reconstruction of a technical term becomes, under his method, a strategic analysis of how the West sought to…
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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…
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‘On the History of Modern Philosophy’ by F. W. J. von Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s On the History of Modern Philosophy appears, in Andrew Bowie’s lucid English translation, as both a retrospective cartography of the main line of early-modern and post-Kantian philosophy and a programmatic intervention in the fate of Idealism itself. Not a mere chronicle, the work offers a disciplined reconstruction of the inner…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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Spinoza On “Pride” [superbia]: Ontology And Sociopolitical Diagnosis
Sybrand Veeger, a researcher at KU Leuven whose work focuses on Spinoza’s metaphysics and political psychology, has engaged in a detailed examination of Spinoza’s treatment of “pride” (superbia) in both the Ethics and the Political Treatise. His discussion, presented at the Conference “Spinoza and Negativity” in Leuven, explores how Spinoza’s emphasis on the commonality of…
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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…
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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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‘Basic Questions of Philosophy’ by Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger’s Basic Questions of Philosophy, emerging from lectures delivered during the Winter semester of 1937–1938 at the University of Freiburg, forms a singular point of entry into the deeper stratum of his philosophical path. The original German text, now part of his posthumously published “Collected Works” (Gesamtausgabe, volume 45), retains its uncompromising directness precisely…
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‘History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena’ by Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Time is a singular entry into the philosophical canon, offering a precursor to Being and Time that reveals the formative motivations and conceptual groundwork behind Heidegger’s later masterpiece. Originating from a 1925 lecture course at the University of Marburg, it presents a phenomenological analysis in which Heidegger explores…
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The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger
The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger is a subtle, challenging, and carefully theorized project that first appeared as a concise yet powerful study of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical involvement within the socio-political context of interwar Germany. Behind its seemingly narrow focus on Heidegger, it opens onto far-reaching questions about the genesis of philosophical discourse and the…
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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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Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator
Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator plunges into the heart of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical development by situating it against the background of Arthur Schopenhauer’s towering influence. The volume unfolds as a study of the tensions, continuities, and convoluted transformations generated when Nietzsche, that restless spirit of modern European thought, confronts Schopenhauer’s austere metaphysical vision…
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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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Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition
Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition is an extended exploration of Heidegger’s method of “destruction” as applied to the reception and interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy. In these passages, Kirkland outlines how Heidegger’s approach is neither a mere repetition nor a total rejection of the inherited metaphysical tradition. Instead, it…
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‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ by Martin Heidegger
In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger presents a formidable and unrelenting analysis of the very conditions of existence, inviting the reader into a difficulty of thought where the primordial question—“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”—resonates as the central enigma that has haunted Western philosophy since its inception. This work, delivered as…
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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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The Teleology of Reason: A Study of the Structure of Kant’s Critical Philosophy
The Teleology of Reason: A Study of the Structure of Kant’s Critical Philosophy by Courtney D. Fugate is a comprehensive philosophical treatise that reinterprets Kant’s critical system through the lens of teleology, aiming to reveal the purposive structures deeply embedded in his arguments. Fugate argues that understanding Kant’s philosophy demands a teleological perspective, one that…
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Idealism and the Problem of Finitude: Heidegger and Hegel
Idealism and the Problem of Finitude: Heidegger and Hegel by Robert B. Pippin presents itself as a penetrating and uncommonly comprehensive exploration of how the post-Kantian tradition, culminating in Hegel’s ambitious “logic as metaphysics,” comes under pressure from a profound critique of human finitude in the thought of Martin Heidegger. This paper argues that the…
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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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Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism
In Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism, Frank Ruda crafts an audacious and deeply intellectual analysis of the paradoxical relationship between freedom and necessity. At the basis of this work lies a provocative argument: the modern conception of freedom as synonymous with the ability to choose is fundamentally flawed, obscuring a…
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Philosophy, Freedom, Language, and their Others: Contemporary Legacies of German Idealism
Philosophy, Freedom, Language, and Their Others: Contemporary Legacies of German Idealism is an ambitious exploration of freedom, philosophy, and their interconnections with language, politics, religion, aesthetics, and ethics. Anchored in the conceptual frameworks of Kantian and Hegelian thought, this anthology does more than merely revisit German Idealism; it transforms the legacy of this philosophical tradition…
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Hegel’s Hellenic Ideal
J. Glenn Gray’s Hegel’s Hellenic Ideal is a study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s engagement with the cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions of ancient Greek civilization and its indelible impact on his thought. Published initially in 1941, this work has become a landmark in the field of German idealism, elucidating how Hegel’s perception of Greek…
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Simon Gros 