Tag: metaphysics
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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
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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…
S. Gros
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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…
S. Gros
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Spinoza and The Incompleteness of Durational Existence
Florian Vermeiren, a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven’s Institute of Philosophy, presented an in-depth analysis of Spinoza’s metaphysics. The presentation took place at the conference “Spinoza and Negativity” at KU Leuven, Belgium, on September 25–27, 2024. Vermeiren’s core argument addresses Hegel’s critique that Spinoza’s system, allegedly lacking the principle of negativity, collapses the diversity 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…
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…
S. Gros
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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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Welt und Zeit—The Metaphysical Implied Corporeal Hypothesis, 21:56—27. February 2025
In thinking the evolution of world and time, we encounter a nexus that beckons us to probe even more deeply into the fundamental structures of existence. This forms a node at which our embodied being, our ontological preconditions for knowledge, and the political disturbances of the contemporary global landscape converge into a single point of…
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Welt und Zeit—Metaphilosophy, 18:06—11. Februar 2025
Metaphilosophy, in its most expansive sense, strives to contemplate not merely the content or methods of philosophical inquiry, but to turn philosophical reflection back upon itself, asking how the discipline of philosophy emerges, sustains itself, and evolves across shifting historical terrains. By interrogating the grounds and aims of philosophy, metaphilosophy reveals that philosophical thought is…
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‘Being & Time’ by Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger’s Being & Time, first published in 1927, is one of the most forceful interventions in modern thought, perpetually demanding that its readers revisit the very essence of philosophy by confronting anew the question of Being. Throughout the twentieth century, it engendered a constellation of interpretive debates across a remarkable range of fields, including…
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Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks
This book offers an exhaustive analysis of one of the twentieth century’s most troubling philosophical enigmas: how Martin Heidegger, perhaps the last great thinker to grapple with the bedrock questions of Being, simultaneously embodied the profound moral collapse that his involvement with Nazism represents. Donatella Di Cesare, in a sweeping and inexorable inquiry, contends that…
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Heidegger’s Metaphysical Abyss: Between the Human and the Animal
Elizabeth Cykowski’s Heidegger’s Metaphysical Abyss: Between the Human and the Animal offers a searching interrogation of how Martin Heidegger’s thought constructs, questions, and radicalises the distinction between human beings and non-human animals. In a work that confronts both the subtle dilemmas of Heidegger’s argumentation and the received criticisms that depict him as forging an insurmountable…
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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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Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from ‘Being and Time’ to the ‘Black Notebooks’
In David Farrell Krell’s Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks, readers encounter a magisterial engagement with two distinct yet inextricably bound dimensions of Martin Heidegger’s corpus: on the one hand, Heidegger’s detailed account of ecstatic temporality in Being and Time, and on the other hand, the highly contested and troubling…
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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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Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology
Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology is a formidable reappraisal that confronts, with unflinching rigor and extraordinary erudition, the profound and inextricable entanglement between Martin Heidegger’s philosophical corpus and his radical political commitments. In a work that traverses the complex intersections of existential ontology and völkisch ideology, Richard Wolin painstakingly demonstrates that the great…
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Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language
In Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language, Hanne Appelqvist curates a philosophically charged exploration of one of the most elusive and pervasive themes in twentieth‐century thought—the very boundary at which language, thought, and experience converge and recede. This collection of essays invites the reader into a multifaceted dialogue that traverses the evolution of Wittgenstein’s ideas…
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The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday
David Egan’s The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday is an erudite and multifaceted analysis that combines the ostensibly disparate strands of Wittgenstein’s crisp, aphoristic examinations of language with Heidegger’s profound and complex analyses of being. At first glance, the works of these two titanic figures seem to inhabit entirely different…
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Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence
Reexamining the case of one of the most famous intellectuals to embrace fascism, this book argues that Martin Heidegger’s politics and philosophy of language emerge from a deep affinity for the ethno-nationalist and anti-Semitic politics of the Nazi movement. Himself a product of a conservative milieu, Heidegger did not have to significantly compromise his thinking…
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Transcendence and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
In this towering reflection on the very foundations of human thought, language, and the ethical life, the reader is drawn into an inquiry that challenges not only the boundaries of what can be expressed but also the very limits of the representational order itself. This work emerges as both a rigorous exegesis and a transformative…
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Heidegger and Nietzsche: Overcoming Metaphysics
In this formidable and exquisitely rigorous exploration, Louis P. Blond offers a penetrating reappraisal of the twin challenges posed by Heidegger and Nietzsche to the long-entrenched tradition of Western metaphysics. The work unfolds as an inquiry into the very conditions under which beings emerge into presence and, by extension, how the nothing—a concept traditionally relegated…
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Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State
In the vast intellectual arena of ancient Greek thought, where the intersection of poetry, ritual, and political organization gave rise to the central structures of Western civilization, the foundational role of reciprocity, ritualized action, and their mediation of social cohesion emerges as a pivotal concern. This book undertakes a rigorous examination of the Homeric epics,…
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Reciprocity in Ancient Greece
Reciprocity in Ancient Greece, edited by Christopher Gill, Norman Postlethwaite, and Richard Seaford, is a pivotal scholarly work that offers an unparalleled exploration into the foundational role of reciprocity within Greek civilization. This comprehensive anthology assembles a distinguished international cadre of experts who examine reciprocity not merely as an economic or social practice but as…
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Sublime Reciprocity in Milton, Kant and Wordsworth: Light Out of Darkness
Light Out of Darkness by Sanford Budick offers an exploration of the themes of reciprocity and the sublime, tracking their manifestation in the works of John Milton, Immanuel Kant, and William Wordsworth. Budick examines how these thinkers and poets interact with and build upon each other’s ideas to illuminate a deeply philosophical understanding of existence,…
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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,…
S. Gros
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Schelling’s Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Thought
In Schelling’s Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought, Ben Woodard engages the expansive and enigmatic oeuvre of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Through a dialogue with Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, Woodard presents a vision of naturalism that reconfigures the boundaries between thought and world, abstraction and materiality, dynamism and structure. This book constitutes not only an…
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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…
S. Gros
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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…
S. Gros
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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…
S. Gros
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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…
S. Gros
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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…
S. Gros
Simon Gros 