Immanuel Kant spent many of his younger years working on what are generally considered his masterpieces: the three Critiques. But his work did not stop there: in later life he began to reconsider subjects such as anthropology, and topics including colonialism, race and peace.In Late Kant, Peter Fenves becomes one of the first to thoroughly explore Kant's later writings and give them the detailed scholarly attention they deserve. In his opening chapters, Fenves exam...

The Messianic Reduction is a groundbreaking study of Walter Benjamin's thought. Fenves places Benjamin's early writings in the context of contemporaneous philosophy, with particular attention to the work of Bergson, Cohen, Husserl, Frege, and Heidegger. By concentrating on a neglected dimension of Benjamin's friendship with Gershom Scholem, who was a student of mathematics before he became a scholar of Jewish mysticism, Fenves shows how mathematical research informs Benjamin's ref...

On Goethe contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volume—newly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an extensive introduction—display a variety of styles and cover a vast array of topics. The collection revolves around two strikingly different essays. Whereas "Goethe's Elective Affinities" develops a theory of critique in which a work is illuminated wholly from within itself, an ar...

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative...

Proposes "the extraordinary" as a defining characteristic of modernity.Translated from the Spanish De lo extraordinario: Nominalismo y Modernidad, this book argues that a defining aspect of modernity is an ever-increasing pursuit of, and need for, what Eduardo Sabrovsky calls "the extraordinary," a term that encompasses both the exception and the miraculous. Sabrovsky shows the degree to which Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities functio...

Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin shows how the poet enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique and still groundbreaking concept of revolution, one that begins with a revolutionary understanding of language. The product of an intense engagement with both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, the book presents Werner Hamacher's major attempts at developing a critical practice commensurate with the immensity of Hölderlin's late writings.These essays offer...

While few would question the importance of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) for the development of German idealism and twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and critical theory, Hölderlin scholarship remains largely inaccessible to those working in English. This is especially true for his novel Hyperion - otherwise his most accessible work - which has not had a book-length study in English devoted to it in more than three decades. Anthony Curtis Adler opens Hölderlin's novel up...

This is the first full-length biography in more than fifty years of Immanuel Kant, one of the giants amongst the pantheon of Western philosophers as well as the one with the most powerful and broad influence on contemporary philosophy. It is well known that Kant spent his entire life in an isolated part of Prussia living the life of a typical university professor. This has given rise to the view that Kant was a pure thinker with no life of his own, or at least none worth considering seriou...

In his quest to solve 'the ever-disquieting riddle of existence', Schopenhauer explored almost every dimension of human existence, developing a darkly compelling worldview that found deep resonance in contemporary literature, music, philosophy, and psychology. This is the first comprehensive biography of Schopenhauer written in English. Placing him in his historical and philosophical contexts, David E. Cartwright tells the story of Schopenhauer's life to convey the full range of his philos...

This immensely readable and absorbing book - the first of a three-volume series on understanding the human mind - concentrates on three major figures who have changed our image of human beings. Kaufmann drastically revises traditional conceptions of Goethe, Kant, and Hegel, showing how their ideas about the mind were shaped by their own distinctive mentalities.Kaufmann's version of psychohistory stays clear of gossip and is carefully documented. He offers us a radically new underst...

History has always been more than just the past. It involves a relationship between past and present, perceived, on the one hand, as a temporal chain of events and, on the other, symbolically as an interpretation that gives meaning to these events through varying cultural orientations, charging it with norms and values, hopes and fears. And it is memory that links the present to the past and therefore has to be seen as the most fundamental procedure of the human mind that constitutes histo...

This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present.In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have con...