Tag: theology
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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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‘Nietzsche’ by Martin Heidegger | 4 Volumes
Heidegger’s four-volume Nietzsche undertakes a rigorous, philologically attentive, and architectonically ambitious determination of Nietzsche’s position within the history of Western metaphysics. Its distinctive scholarly stake lies in showing how the triad will to power–eternal recurrence of the same–revaluation of values coheres as a single meta-conceptual decision about beings as a whole, one that consummates metaphysics…
S. Gros
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G.W.F. Hegel: The Berlin Phenomenology
The Berlin Phenomenology presents, in a compact and rigorously articulated register, a doctrine of consciousness that is at once internal to the Encyclopaedia’s systematic architecture and responsive to the empirical texture of the human sciences. Its distinctive scholarly stake lies in exhibiting how consciousness, treated not as a free-standing tribunal but as a domain continuous…
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The Problem of Religion, Christianity, and the Role of Protestantism in the Philosophy of the Early Hegel (1795–1806)
Hinging its argument on the early Hegel’s struggle to convert religious inheritance into a generative logic of system, Dr. Imre Bártfai’s study isolates religion—Christianity in general and Protestantism in particular—as a constructive problem-space through which moral aspiration, civic motivation, and speculative method are successively refashioned from Tübingen through Bern and Frankfurt into Jena. The work’s…
S. Gros
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The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time
Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time is less a commentary than a topographical and documentary reconstruction of the pathway whose precipices and detours led to Sein und Zeit. A work written under the constraint that a philosophy which avowedly privileges the temporally unfolding situation of questioning cannot be explained by a static…
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Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge
Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge is one of the deepest analyses of the fraught yet inseparable relationship between religious faith and philosophical cognition in modernity, showing his early quest to harmonize the spiritual yearning of humanity with the rigorous demands of Enlightenment reason. Published in 1802 within the Critical Journal that he co-edited with Schelling, it…
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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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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‘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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‘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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‘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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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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‘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…
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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‘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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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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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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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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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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The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany 1750-1800
Robert S. Leventhal’s The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany, 1750–1800 is a genealogy of interpretive reason at the precise historical moment when “reading” ceases to be a private virtuosity and becomes a structured practice, an institutional technology, and a self-questioning mode of historical knowledge. Published by Walter de Gruyter in…
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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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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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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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Welt und Zeit—Ontology, 17:23—11. Februar 2025
Ontology is the relentless unveiling of what it means for anything—and everything—to be, the ceaseless attempt to articulate the fundamental structures undergirding existence and to recognize the shared horizon in which human beings encounter a world they simultaneously constitute and inhabit. Ontology is not merely a catalog of entities or a bare enumeration of concepts;…
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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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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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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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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…
Simon Gros 