Tag: Philosophy
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The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Lea Ypi’s The Architectonic of Reason isolates and restores a neglected nerve of the Critique of Pure Reason: the Doctrine of Method’s culminating section on architectonic unity. Its precise scholarly stake is to show how Kant’s system requires a transcendental principle of purposiveness to integrate theoretical and practical uses of reason, and to explain why…
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‘The Art of Literature’ by Arthur Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer’s The Art of Literature advances a stringent, programmatic account of writing in which the value of literature is indexed to the purity of its cognitive aim and to the discipline with which style renders thought visible. The volume’s distinctive contribution is twofold: first, it binds the praxis of authorship to a normative anthropology—of learning,…
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Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials
The distinctive stake of Eric Watkins’ Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials lies in turning the problem of “Kant’s context” from a diffuse generality into a precise, source-based field in which the semantic, methodological, and polemical options recognized by Kant’s German readership can be reconstructed from the inside. The volume does this by…
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‘Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music’ by Theodor W. Adorno
Adorno’s Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music advances a project as exacting as it is audacious: to reconstruct Beethoven’s music as a determinate mode of thought whose inner formal tensions both register and adjudicate the historical experience of a society moving toward rationalized totality. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in the way it treats musical material…
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Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life
Andreja Novakovic’s Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life isolates, with unusual precision, a single hinge in Hegel’s practical philosophy and turns the whole edifice on it: the claim that subjective freedom is best realized when ethical norms have sedimented as second nature, such that agents inhabit a rational order without the friction of perpetual…
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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 distinction 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 scholarly stake is not merely curatorial. By arranging reviews, essays, and…
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Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism
This volume advances a precise and austere scholarly stake: it offers the first sustained, plural, and text-grounded assessment of how the anti-Jewish remarks in the Black Notebooks intersect with, and in key passages are articulated from within, Heidegger’s being-historical project. Under the editorship of Andrew J. Mitchell and Peter Trawny, it refuses the disjunction between…
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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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The Wagnerian Sublime: Four Lacanian Readings of Classic Operas
Žižek’s The Wagnerian Sublime: Four Lacanian Readings of Classic Operas stakes a precise claim: that opera’s most persistent scenes of longing, blockage, and impossible union are not melodramatic ornaments but analytic diagrams of desire’s economy, and that music—the privileged bearer of an inner “truth”—stages the objectless insistence of drive more rigorously than narrative ever can.…
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Franz Kafka: The Castle
The Castle advances a rigorously meditated problem of access, authorization, and interpretability, elaborated with a precision that binds the sensory density of village life to an ever-receding horizon of jurisdiction housed, by communal consensus, on the hill. Its distinctive contribution is to bind the phenomenology of waiting, the grammar of petition and reply, and the…
S. Gros
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‘On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The 1934-35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays’ by Martin Heidegger
On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The 1934–35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays is one of the most unsettling and indispensable documents of twentieth-century philosophy, precisely because it places Martin Heidegger’s thought at the crossroads where metaphysics, politics, and history converge in a moment of fateful intensity. Emerging from the winter semester of 1934–35 at Freiburg, just…
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‘Plato’s Sophist’ by Martin Heidegger
Plato’s Sophist by Martin Heidegger, reconstructed from his seminal 1924–25 lecture course at the University of Marburg, is both an extraordinary exposition of Greek philosophy and a key elaboration of Heidegger’s own ontological concerns, bridging the ancient and the modern in a transformative philosophical dialogue. This work is a rigorous philosophical undertaking, threading Plato’s dialogue…
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Letters: 1925-1975 by Hannah Arendt & Martin Heidegger
The volume that gathers the correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger from 1925 to 1975 is not simply a compendium of private sentiments made public, but an exacting, often disquieting dossier of the twentieth century’s conceptual crises refracted through the most intimate medium two thinkers share: a practice of writing that tests the limits…
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‘Being Towards Death’: Heidegger and the Orthodox Theology of the East
“Being Towards Death”: Heidegger and the Orthodox Theology of the East embodies a far-reaching analysis of Christian theology through the existential prism of Martin Heidegger’s thought, enshrined above all in his notion of “being towards death,” while simultaneously engaging the mystical and apophatic spirit of Eastern Orthodoxy. It undertakes the formidable task of merging together…
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Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin-Heidegger-Celan
In Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice: Hölderlin–Heidegger–Celan, the reader is drawn into an unusually deep reflection that insists on bringing poetry and philosophy face to face with the most pressing questions of ethics, law, and the hidden exigencies of what it means to measure the immeasurable. The volume ventures beyond any conventional moral or…
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…
S. Gros
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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…
S. Gros
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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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‘Against Progress’ by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress is not a conventional monograph so much as a deliberately fissured surface that refuses to heal: a collection of analytic incursions that turn the received object—“progress”—into a problem that will not stop returning as symptom, screen, and compulsion. The wager is that only a description that never quite stabilizes can meet…
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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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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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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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‘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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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…
Simon Gros 