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On Freud
Elvio Fachinelli was one of the most original and controversial Italian psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. He viewed psychoanalytic theory as inextricably linked to the concrete experience of everyday reality and as a crucial compass for understanding the social and political turmoil of his era. This compact volume collects Fachinelli’s writing on Freud, offering readers…
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The Anti-Romantic: Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism
Hegel’s critique of Early German Romanticism and its theory of irony resonates to the core of his own philosophy in the same way that Plato’s polemics with the Sophists have repercussions that go to the centre of his thought. The Anti-Romantic examines Hegel’s critique of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher. Hegel rarely mentions these thinkers by name…
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Hegel’s Grammatical Ontology: Vanishing Words and Hermeneutical Openness in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’
Reading The Phenomenology of Spirit through a linguistic lens, Jeffrey Reid provides an original commentary on Hegel’s most famous work. Beginning with a close analysis of the preface, where Hegel himself addresses the book’s difficulty and explains his tortured language in terms of what he calls the “speculative proposition”, Reid demonstrates how every form of consciousness discussed…
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Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza: A Study in German Idealism, 1801–1831
Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza explores the powerful continuing influence of Spinoza’s metaphysical thinking in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy. George di Giovanni examines the ways in which Hegel’s own metaphysics sought to meet the challenges posed by Spinoza’s monism, not by disproving monism, but by rendering it moot. In this, di…
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The Problem of Nature in Hegel’s Final System
Wes Furlotte critically evaluates Hegel’s philosophy of human freedom in terms of his often-disregarded conception of nature. In doing so, he gives us a new portrait of Hegel’s final system that is surprisingly relevant for our contemporary world, connecting it with recent work in speculative realism and new materialism. Furlotte offers a sophisticated sense of…
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The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985
Although Freud made only one visit to the United States, the spectacular rise and equally precipitous decline of his theories on human behaviour continue to make headlines. In 1956, celebrating the centennial of Freud’s birth, popular magazines reported that this “Darwin of the Mind” had fathered modern psychiatry, psychology, child raising, education, and sexual attitudes.…
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Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917
Examines the medical, moral, and social conditions prevailing at the time in order to understand why America embraced Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. See also Volume 2: The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985. DOWNLOAD: (.pdf)
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Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology
If Kant had never made the “critical turn” of 1773, would he be worth more than a paragraph in the history of philosophy? Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know.…
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Adorno: A Critical Introduction
This new introduction offers a comprehensive and accessible account of Adorno’s work. Jarvis discusses the intellectual and institutional contexts for Adorno’s thought and, in a broad-ranging study, examines his contributions to social theory, cultural theory, aesthetics, and philosophy. He shows how a re-examination of Adorno’s work from the perspective of classical German philosophy allows us…
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The Political Vocation of Philosophy
It is time for philosophy to return to the city. In today’s crisis-ridden world of globalised capitalism, increasingly closed in on itself, it may seem harder than ever to think of ways out. Philosophy runs the risk of becoming the handmaiden of science and of a hollowed-out democracy. Donatella Di Cesare calls on philosophy instead…
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Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work
For over a century, Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism has been a crucial resource for social movements. Now, recent economic crises have made it imperative for us to comprehend and actualize Marx’s ideas. But without a knowledge of Karl Marx’s life as he lived it, neither Marx nor his works can be fully understood. There…
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Book Review: The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic
While this short book is without a doubt a very important introductory study for anyone interested in G.W.F. Hegel and his reception, especially in different places such as the 20th century France and China, it has one huge major drawback: The book itself is set into a “Badiouian” framework, and in contemporary philosophical literature there…
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Book Review: Antigone’s Parallax by Zupančič
My copy of the book is titled “I’d let them rot” and not “Let Them Rot” as listed on Amazon. This might seem like a minor difference, but it’s the one between opinion and injunction. The variation of the title without the added “I’d” seems like a Kantian imperative of “one must”, while adding “I…
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Book Review: Žižek’s ‘Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed’
Worst thing to happen to Hegel since the birth of Jesus. On a more serious note, there is one minor detail about this work I simply don’t understand, and it’s the following: Žižek here directly equates Lacan’s notion of the objet a with what he calls surplus-enjoyment. Don’t the two concepts work at entirely different…
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(Short) Book Review: ‘Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World’ by Slavoj Žižek
Through the night I decided to read through this shorter work by Žižek, as it fits the current circumstances I’m in, where I don’t have the energy or focus to deal with more in-depth, longer philosophical works of his. As the title Pandemic! suggests, the author wrote this book in some sort of a panic…
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Preliminary thoughts on the new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by Fuss & Dobbins
I’ve recently discovered that the notorious Phenomenology by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has been re-translated into English yet again, making the previous A. V. Miller translation now seemingly outdated. The publisher’s blurb of the University of Notre Dame Press for the 2019 translation by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins reads as follows: “The Phenomenology of…