Tag: Philosophy
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‘America Against America’ by Wang Huning
In 1988, a young Chinese scholar undertook a research trip to the United States at a moment when the world was undergoing profound political and economic realignments. Over the course of six months, he traveled through 30 cities and visited 20 universities, observing not only institutions of learning and government, but the texture of everyday…
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G.W.F. Hegel on Art, Religion, Philosophy: Introductory Lectures to the Realm of Absolute Spirit
Hegel’s On Art, Religion, Philosophy: Introductory Lectures to the Realm of Absolute Spirit is a deliberately constructed threshold-text: it merges a mature system into three gateways where the highest activities of spirit reveal their common telos while retaining their distinct modes. J. Glenn Gray’s edition frames these gateways as a single pedagogical arc that makes…
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The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism
The distinctive contribution of Andrew Arato and Paul Breines’s The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism lies in its rigorous reconstruction of a problem: how a singular, crisis-formed synthesis of German idealism and revolutionary Marxism emerged, condensed, and fractured in and around History and Class Consciousness, and how that synthesis founded an intellectual…
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The Unconscious in Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis: On Lacan and Freud
Marco Máximo Balzarini’s The Unconscious in Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis: On Lacan and Freud isolates with unusual precision the point at which two powerful explanatory regimes—neurobiological description and psychoanalytic articulation—cease to translate into one another and nevertheless cannot stop addressing the same phenomena. Its distinctive contribution is to formalize that impasse as a productive constraint on…
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‘In Defense of Lost Causes’ by Slavoj Žižek
In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek is a sweeping philosophical manifesto that boldly confronts the prevailing liberal-democratic consensus, advocating for a re-engagement with radical politics and the revolutionary ideals of the past. Žižek’s work is both a critical examination and a daring re-evaluation of historical totalitarian movements, aiming to uncover and revitalize their…
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G. K. Chesterton’ Orthodoxy
Chesterton’ Orthodoxy presents itself as an intellectual experiment whose distinctive contribution lies in demonstrating, by autobiographical method and argumentative pressure, that classical Christian doctrine functions as a methodological key for holding together experiences that otherwise disintegrate into skepticism, sentimentality, or fanaticism. Its scholarly stake is to exhibit how a determinate creed—summarized by the Apostles’ Creed—does…
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Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion
Walter Jaeschke’s Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion stakes a precise claim: it reconstructs, with philological rigor and systematic intent, how Hegel regrounds the very possibility of a philosophy of religion by reopening the question that Kant appeared to close—whether speculative reason can know God—and by tracking how that reopening reshapes…
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Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History
Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History stake a precise claim: historical knowledge becomes truthful only where method and danger coincide in a configuration that interrupts the supposed continuum of events and condenses remembrance into an explosive present. Its distinctive contribution is to bind materialist historiography to a rigorously minimal theology, in which the past…
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The Seminars of Jacques Lacan
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan are an organized experiment in epistemic restraint and conceptual invention, a multi-decadal laboratory where psychoanalysis is made to answer for its own concepts by submitting them to the exigencies of speech, structure, and act. Their distinctive contribution is a method for holding the Freudian field at the point of maximal…
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‘Five Lessons on Wagner’ by Alain Badiou
Five Lessons on Wagner presents a philosopher’s rigorous attempt to re-situate Wagner within the field where aesthetics, ideology, and method intersect. Badiou’s wager is that Wagner is less a historical composer to be judged by posterior moral verdicts than a recurrent operator that allows philosophy to test its own concepts—identity, myth, totalization, continuity, and subject—under…
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‘Richard Wagner’ by Francis Hueffer
Hueffer’s Richard Wagner occupies the precise historical interval in which the composer’s career was still a moving target and yet sufficiently formed to admit a synoptic judgment. The book’s distinctive contribution is twofold: it articulates a continuous line from the biographical restlessness of a “man of action” to the evolving grammar of the modern music-drama,…
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The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality
The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality stakes a precise claim in the crowded field of voice studies: it recenters inquiry on voices as sensuous, technical, and historically situated phenomena while keeping in view psychoanalytic accounts of vocal excess and desire. The book’s distinctive contribution is a method of double illumination: raising the light…
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The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1912-1914
The distinctive scholarly stake of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 4: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1912–1914 lies in its careful assembly of texts that document the conceptual and technical struggle by which Einstein sought to unify the relativity principle, the equality of inertial and gravitational mass, and the conservation of energy–momentum into a…
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The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 2: The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909
The distinctive scholarly stake of this translation volume lies in its doubly mediating function: it returns Einstein’s 1900–1909 writings to the conditions of their original formulation—terminology, mathematical notations, and rhetorical textures—while synchronizing those conditions with an English idiom restrained to accuracy rather than fluency. The contribution is therefore twofold. It assembles, in strict sequence and…
Simon Gros 