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On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative
Hegel is most famous for his view that conflicts between contrary positions are necessarily resolved. Whereas this optimism, inherent in modernity as such, has been challenged from Kierkegaard onward, many critics have misconstrued Hegel’s own intentions. Focusing on the Science of Logic, this transformative reading of Hegel on the one hand exposes the immense force […]
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Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant
Hegel’s critique of Kant was a turning point in the history of philosophy: for the first time, the concrete, situated, and in certain senses “naturalistic” style pioneered by Hegel confronted the thin, universalistic, and argumentatively purified style of philosophy that had found its most rigorous expression in Kant. The controversy has hardly died away: it […]
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Hegel’s Grand Synthesis: A Study of Being, Thought, and History
This book offers the first genuinely systematic treatment of Hegel’s eschatology in the literature. It is an investigation into Hegel’s project to demonstrate the ultimate unity of thought and being (consciousness and reality, self and world). The author traces the project through Hegel’s epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of history. The grand synthesis creates a basic […]
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The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism
For philosophers of German idealism and early German romanticism, the imagination is central to issues ranging from hermeneutics to transcendental logic and from ethics to aesthetics. This volume of new essays brings together, for the first time, comprehensive and critical reflections on the significances of the imagination during this period, with essays on Kant and […]
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Logik Und Moderne: Hegels Wissenschaft Der Logik Als Paradigma Moderner Subjektivität
Die Wissenschaft der Logik kann ohne Zweifel als das Hauptwerk Hegels mit epochemachender Bedeutung gelten. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes machen deutlich, dass es sich um eine moderne Logik handelt, die gegen das Märchen vom sogenannten ‚nachmetaphysischen‘ Zeitalter eine die vormalige Metaphysik aufhebende neue Metaphysik bietet und damit eine revolutionäre Zäsur in der Philosophiegeschichte darstellt. Es wird nachgewiesen, dass Hegels Logik ein […]
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Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology
Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and […]
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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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Absolute Form: Modality, Individuality and the Principle of Philosophy in Kant and Hegel
Metabolic form inverts itself into content. Highlighting Hegel’s conceptual realism, Hoffmann focuses on an undervalued move in his dialectic: inversion (μεταβολή). From precursors in Kant the author validates the philosopher’s claim in not supplying a completeness proof for his table of categories: it’s easy! Hoffmann shows how his new approach works on Hegel’s central terms–paradigmatically […]
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An Ethical Modernity?: Hegel’s Concept of Ethical Life Today
An Ethical Modernity? investigates the relation between Hegel’s doctrine of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and modernity as a historical category and a philosophical concept. In this collection of essays, the authors analyze Hegel’s theory of ethical life from various perspectives: social ontology, social practices and beliefs, theory of judgment, relations between Hegel’s theory of ethical life and […]
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Concepts of Normativity: Kant or Hegel?
The influence of Kant’s understanding of morality is too strong to be ignored. Hegel, however, fundamentally criticized Kant for offering merely a ‘formal’ model of normativity that cannot sufficiently comprehend human action as free. Instead, Hegel argues in his doctrine of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) that the embeddedness of the acting subject must be taken into […]
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Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in “The Science of Logic”
Hegel frequently claimed that the heart of his entire system was a book widely regarded as among the most difficult in the history of philosophy, The Science of Logic. This is the book that presents his metaphysics, an enterprise that he insists can only be properly understood as a “logic,” or a “science of pure thinking.” Since […]
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The Sublime Object of Ideology (Second Edition)
The Sublime Object of Ideology was Žižek’s first book to have appeared in English in 1989, which instantly became an astonishing international success of global academic scholarship at that time, and later a classic of philosophical literature, an achievement which even he himself has only attempted to mimic and surpass since then, with more or less […]
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Sexuality in the Field of Vision
In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Jacqueline Rose argues for the importance of sexual difference and fantasy as key concepts through which an interrogation of contemporary theory should be sustained. A brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and film theory. DOWNLOAD: (.pdf & .epub)
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Translating Freud
This book describes the problems that become apparent when translating Freud’s subtle thought and supple wording and examines the way in which these dilemmas are affected by the language―French, Spanish, and English―into which the work is translated. The authors are internationally distinguished experts in Freud and language, most of whom have taught Freud’s work in […]
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Circling Marx: Essays 1980-2020
Karl Marx circles us, and we him. This reflects the power of his legacy, but it also indicates the nature of the intellectual process. We move around objects of interest and insight, working by successive approximations. Peter Beilharz has been circling Marx for forty years. This volume of essays expands the metaphor by working through […]
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Kant and the Claims of Taste
Kant and the Claims of Taste, here published in a revised version, has become since its initial publication in 1979 the standard commentary on Kant’s aesthetic theory. The book offers a detailed account of Kant’s views on judgments of taste, aesthetic pleasure, imagination and many other topics. For this new edition, Paul Guyer has provided […]
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The Political Economy of Marx
This book provides a comprehensive exposition and appraisal of Marx’s political economy, beginning with the philosophical and sociological foundations of his work and indication how his economic theory emerged from a critique of classical political economy. The authors proceed to examine in detail the theory of exploitation, capitalist development and imperialism, and pay special attention […]
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Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary
Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). It differs from most recent commentaries in paying special attention to the structure of the work, the historical context in which it was written, and the views to which Kant was responding. Allison argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the […]
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Violence and the Sacred
Violence and the Sacred is René Girard’s landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard’s forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and […]
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Hegel: A Re-Examination
First published in 2002. Written in 1958, this book offers a re-examination of Hegel’s work, and is the volume I of a series of seven volumes on his work. Starting with a biography and the key ideas, the author offers his own explanations of ideas that are central in Hegel: being the notion of spirit, […]
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Sigmund Freud: An Introduction
Jean-Michel Quinodoz introduces the essential life and work of Sigmund Freud, from the beginning of his clinical experiences in Vienna in the 1880s to his final years in London in the 1930s. Freud’s discoveries, including universally-influential concepts like the Oedipus complex and the interpretation of dreams, continue to be applied in many disciplines today. Elegantly […]
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Can Politics Be Thought?
In Can Politics Be Thought?—published in French in 1985 and appearing here in English for the first time—Alain Badiou offers his most forceful and systematic analysis of the crisis of Marxism. Distinguishing politics as an active mode of thinking from the political as a domain of the State, Badiou argues for the continuation of Marxist politics. […]
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The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression
What happens when we lose someone we love? A death, a separation or the break-up of a relationship are some of the hardest times we have to live through. We may fall into a nightmare of depression, lose the will to live and see no hope for the future. What matters at this crucial point […]
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Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts
Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts is the first book to comprehensively assess Beckett’s knowledge of art, art history and art criticism. In his lifetime Beckett thought deeply about visual culture from ancient Egyptian statuary to Dutch realism, from Quattrocento painting to the modernists and after. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished […]
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Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud’s Writings
Winner of the 2010 Sigourney Award Reading Freud provides an accessible outline of the whole of Freud’s work from Studies in Hysteria through to An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. It succeeds in expressing even the most complex of Freud’s theories in clear and simple language whilst avoiding over-simplification. Each chapter concentrates on an individual text and includes valuable background information, […]
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The Wagnerian Sublime: Four Lacanian Readings of Classic Operas
In four compelling essays on classic opera, Slavoj Žižek examines how certain structural motifs repeatedly dominate the narratives by putting desire, as pure and captivating as possible, into music and on stage. Wagner’s heroes, for instance, suffer from unbearable longing (Parsifal), an excessive yearning for the absolute (The Flying Dutchman), a deadly surplus of pure […]
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Permanent Record
Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke […]
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Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society
This collection introduces and develops Lacanian thought concerning the relations among language, subjectivity, and society. Lacanian Theory of Discourse provides an account of how language both interacts with and constitutes structures of subjectivity, producing specific attitudes and behaviors as well as significant social effects. DOWNLOAD: (.pdf)
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Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy
In Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy—published originally in Japanese and now available in four languages—Kojin Karatani questions the idealization of ancient Athens as the source of philosophy and democracy by placing the origins instead in Ionia, a set of Greek colonies located in present-day Turkey. Contrasting Athenian democracy with Ionian isonomia—a system based on non-rule […]
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Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud
Nation and Aesthetics is a unique attempt to examine the ambiguous nature of nationalism and nation by examining them through aesthetics. In this translation by Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni, Karatani grasps the modern social formation as a nexus of three different “modes of exchange”, namely capital-nation-state. Nation here plays the role […]
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The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction
Kant declared that philosophy began in 1781 with his Critique of Pure Reason. In 1806 Hegel announced that philosophy had now been completed. Eckart Förster examines the reasons behind these claims and assesses the steps that led in such a short time from Kant’s “beginning” to Hegel’s “end.” He concludes that, in an unexpected yet significant sense, […]
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Hegelian Metaphysics
The great German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel has exerted an immense influence on the development of philosophy from the early 19th century to the present. But the metaphysical aspects of his thought are still under-appreciated. In a series of essays Robert Stern traces the development of a distinctively Hegelian approach to metaphysics and […]
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Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification
Robert Stern investigates how scepticism can be countered by using transcendental arguments concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, language, or thought. He shows that the most damaging sceptical questions concern neither the certainty of our beliefs, nor the reliability of our belief-forming methods, but rather whether we can justify our beliefs in […]
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Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard
In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves ‘author’ or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this ‘argument from autonomy’, and […]
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Negative Dialectics
The major work and Adorno’s culminating achievement. Negative Dialectics is a critique of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, and a visionary elaboration of the author’s own vision of dialectics. DOWNLOAD: (.pdf & .epub, multiple files, original German and two English translations)
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Plato: Complete Works
Outstanding translations by leading contemporary scholars—many commissioned especially for this volume—are presented here in the first single edition to include the entire surviving corpus of works attributed to Plato in antiquity. In his introductory essay, John Cooper explains the presentation of these works, discusses questions concerning the chronology of their composition, comments on the dialogue […]
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Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own […]
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Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School
Toward a Concrete Philosophy explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismissal of him once he turned to the Nazi party in 1933. Mikko Immanen provides a fascinating glimpse of the three future giants of twentieth-century social criticism when they were still looking for their philosophical […]
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Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia: Five Lectures
Back in print after fifty years and with a new introduction by Ray Brassier, this often overlooked but prescient collection of Marcuse’s lectures makes an impassioned plea for the overthrowing of capitalism. Analysing the work of Freud and Marx, and taking in topics like automation, work, postcapitalism, utopia, and technology, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia excavates the psychic roots of the current crisis […]
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The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling: History, System, and Freedom
The figure of Schelling, prince of the romantics, has been too long overshadowed by that of Hegel, no doubt for more than one historical or doctrinal reason. If the three fellow students at the Tubingen seminary—Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling—swore eternal loyalty to the great ideal of the French revolution, freedom, the remainder of their intellectual […]
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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 […]