Tag: metaphysics
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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…
S. Gros
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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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The Return of Hegel
There are works whose apparent modesty—an introduction to a special issue, a framing essay for a post-conference collection—conceals a more demanding wager, namely, to test whether philosophy can still organize experience without doing violence to what is fragile, fractured, and historically scarred in that experience. The Return of Hegel: History, Dialectics and the Weak: Introduction…
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Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud
Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud appears, in this great English translation by Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni, as a sustained experiment in re-plotting the coordinates through which we have learned to read the modern: not along the now-familiar axis that runs from economy to culture by way of a…
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‘A Century of Philosophy’ by Hans-Georg Gadamer
A Century of Philosophy is neither a mere memoir nor simply a late summa, rather it’s a deliberately refracted self-portrait by way of conversation, it exposes the inner grammar of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s thought under the pressure of historical catastrophe and intellectual dispute. It takes the shape of ten dialogues recorded in 1999–2000 between the centenarian…
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Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth
An elusive and recalcitrant conception of truth, scattered in aphorisms and mobilized as a methodological demand rather than codified as a thesis, stands at the core of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophical project. Yet Adorno never provides a canonical doctrine of truth. The interpretive risk this absence creates—between mistaking negativity for skepticism and canonizing critique into…
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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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Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Itzhak Benyamini’s Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis advances a thesis at once straightforward in its declaration and difficult in its execution: that the self-proclaimed “return to Freud,” which ordered Jacques Lacan’s trajectory across the mid-twentieth century, never proceeded in a strictly secular key, never unfolded as a merely technical renovation of Freudian metapsychology,…
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Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
The provocation of Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle is announced in its title, and the title in turn is anchored in the old Freudian joke that stages denial by multiplication rather than refutation: I never borrowed your kettle; I returned it unbroken; it was already broken when I borrowed it. The enumeration negates nothing; it confesses…
S. Gros
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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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‘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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Hegel and Heidegger on Time
In Hegel and Heidegger on Time, Ioannis Trisokkas sets out a sustained examination of how two different philosophical architectures render time intelligible and what follows for ontology when time is either granted or denied the status of a grounding horizon. The book does not present a catalogue of positions or a tidy comparison, but rather…
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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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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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‘Political Jouissance’ by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s Political Jouissance is not a treatise that cordons enjoyment off from politics as an embarrassing excess to be evacuated in the name of sober normativity; rather, it stages the paradox that politics is already traversed by enjoyment at its very core, such that any attempt at a purely dispassionate civic rationality is itself…
S. Gros
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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…
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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Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: An Introduction
Michael Ure’s Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: An Introduction presents Nietzsche’s most intimate book as the staging ground for a philosophical experiment that is biographical without becoming anecdotal, therapeutic without slipping into self-help, and rigorously contextual without reducing aphorism to doctrine. Ure’s point of departure is that The Gay Science is at once a philosophical autobiography…
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Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Edited Anthology
The very premise of an edited anthology of Nietzsche’s political writings is bound to irritate habits of reading that still treat “politics” as either a contaminant to be quarantined from “culture” or a marginal afterthought to the “real” philosophical work. Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky turn that irritation into method. Their Political Writings of Friedrich…
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Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks
What Charles Bambach examines in Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks is not yet another catalogue of incriminating biographical episodes nor a gesture of apologetic compartmentalization, but a tightly wound reconstruction of a discursive field—linguistic, philological, philosophical, and political—within which Martin Heidegger’s thinking from 1933 to 1945 was composed, staged, and made to…
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The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns
D. C. Schindler’s The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns presents a sustained philosophical attempt to unseat the tacit hegemony of a merely possibilistic conception of freedom and to recover, through an exacting dialogue with Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, an account of freedom as actuality, completion, and form.…
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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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‘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…
S. Gros
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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 Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature
Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel is a meditation on the evolution and nature of the novel, written against the backdrop of a world on the cusp of dramatic transformation. Emerging from the intellectual milieu of Central Europe in the early 20th century—a time when Marxism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism were beginning to shape the…
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Hegel’s Idea of Philosophy
Hegel’s Idea of Philosophy by Quentin Lauer, S.J. constitutes a philosophically consequential effort to clarify the conceptual essence of Hegel’s philosophical enterprise, particularly as it is manifested in Hegel’s Introduction to the History of Philosophy. This work is neither a mere historical summary nor a perfunctory commentary; rather, it is an act of philosophical reflection…
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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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‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History by Immanuel Kant
Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History by Immanuel Kant, edited by Pauline Kleingeld and translated by David L. Colclasure, offers one of the most comprehensive and systematically contextualized presentations of Kant’s political writings currently available in English. It is a volume that not only assembles Kant’s most significant interventions in…
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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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Heidegger in the Islamicate World
Heidegger in the Islamicate World — edited by Kata Moser, Urs Gösken, and Josh Michael Hayes; series edited by Richard Polt and Gregory Fried — is an intellectual excavation and a conceptual re-orientation: at once a map of a dispersed reception and a programmatic provocation. The book refuses the facile opposition between a supposedly monolithic…
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Heidegger, Kant & Time
Charles M. Sherover’s Heidegger, Kant & Time is a demanding and deeply meditative work that refuses to treat philosophy as a succession of historical curiosities or as a series of doctrines to be cited and forgotten. Instead, it stages what the Greeks once understood as the essential task of memory: not the hoarding of past…
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Hegel’s Philosophy Of The State And Of History: An Exposition (1902)
Hegel’s Philosophy of the State and of History: An Exposition, edited and interpreted by George Sylvester Morris, constitutes a formative landmark in the English-language reception of G.W.F. Hegel’s mature political and historical thought. Composed as part of the German Philosophical Classics for English Readers and Students series and first published in the late 19th century,…
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An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History
Stephen Houlgate’s An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History is more than a survey of one of modern philosophy’s most demanding thinkers but a comprehensive, conceptually rigorous, historically grounded, and systemically faithful reconstruction of the architecture and dynamism of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical system. More than an introduction in the superficial pedagogical sense, Houlgate’s work…
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Hegel’s Diary (1785–1787) With Explanatory Footnotes
Sunday, June 26 1785 In the morning service, Reverend Rieger, the court preacher, gave the sermon. He first read the Augsburg Confession, beginning with its preface, and then the sermon followed. Even if I had remembered nothing else, my knowledge of history would nonetheless have been increased. I learned that on June 25, 1530, the…
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Adorno’s Prisms
Prisms is a piercing collection of essays in which Theodor W. Adorno gathers a broad array of subjects—from philosophical reflections on the unconscious threads of culture, to spirited analyses of Aldous Huxley’s nightmarish visions, to the often disavowed contradictions in the realm of museums, to the latent qualities of Bach’s counterpoint—as if to fracture every…
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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…
S. Gros
Simon Gros 