Philosophy for Non-Philosophers

ISBN-13: 9781474299275 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 224 str.

Louis Althusser; G. M. Goshgarian

Opis

In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life, Louis Althusser penned Philosophy for Non-philosophers. Available here for the first time in English, Philosophy for Non-philosophers constitutes a rigorous and engaged attempt to address a wide reading public unfamiliar with Althusser's project. As such, the work is a concentration of the most fundamental theses of Althusser's own ideas, and presents a synthesis of his sprawling and disparate philosophical and political writings. Nowhere else does Althusser push the distinction between philosophy and other disciplines as far, or develop in such detail the concept of 'practice'. Rather than a work of 'popular philosophy', Philosophy for Non-philosophers is a continuation and conglomeration of Althusser's thought; a thought whose radicality is still perceptible in those that have followed since. Philosophy for Non-philosophers thus provides a vivid encapsulation of Althusser's seminal influence on the leading thinkers of today, including Ranciere, Badiou, Balibar, and Zizek.

Recenzje

This book presents us Louis Althusser at his very best. Written in a style that is genuinely accessible to the non-philosophers while still accumulating one brilliant insight after another for the specialists, this previously unpublished manuscript tackles some of the most fundamental questions of all times: What is philosophy? How did it first arise? What is its relation to religion, to science, and to politics? In what way is philosophy the class struggle in theory? Why does this struggle take the repeated form of a split between two practices of philosophy, one idealist and the other materialist? And how can we develop a new, aleatory understanding of materialism after Marx? Bruno Bosteels, Visiting Professor Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society Colum Professor Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA

Spis treści

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction by Warren MontagNote on the text by G.M. GoshgarianPhilosophy for Non-Philosophers1. What Non-philosophers Say2. Philosophy and ReligionThe Big Detour3. Abstraction4. Technical Abstraction and Scientific Abstraction5. Philosophical Abstraction6. The Myth of the State of Nature7. What is Practice?8. The Practice of Production9. Scientific Practice and Idealism10. Scientific Practice and Materialism11. Ideological Practice12. The Ideological State Apparatuses13. Political Practice14. Psychoanalytic Practice15. Artistic Practice16. Philosophical Practice17. Dominant Ideology and Philosophy18. Philosophy as Theoretical Laboratory19. Ideology and Philosophy20. Philosophy and the Science of Class Struggle21. A New Practice of Philosophy22. The Dialectic: Laws or Theses?NotesIndex

O autorze

Louis Althusser was a prominent French philosopher of the late twentieth century. His works include seminal writings on Marx, and the relation between post-war Marxist thought and other emerging discourses across the humanities (namely, structuralism). His works include, For Marx and Reading Capital. G. M. Goshgarian translates fiction and philosophy from French, German, and Armenian into English. He is the translator of two collections of the work of Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Philosophy of the Encounter, as well as two books by him, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers (Bloomsbury 2017) and How to Be Marxist in Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2017).