In The Tragedy of Philosophy Andrew Cooper challenges the prevailing idea of the death of tragedy, arguing that this assumption reflects a problematic view of both tragedy and philosophy--one that stifles the profound contribution that tragedy could provide to philosophy today. To build this case, Cooper presents a novel reading of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. Although this text is normally understood as the final attempt to seal philosophy from the threat of tragedy, Cooper argues that Kant's project is rather a creative engagement with a tragedy that is specific to...

In his last book, Towards a Relational Ontology, Andrew Benjamin provided a philosophical account of what he terms anoriginal relationality, demonstrating how this concept can be seen to be at work throughout the history of philosophy. In Virtue in Being, he builds on that project to argue for a new way of understanding the relationship between ontology and ethics through insightful readings of texts by Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. Structuring the book around the themes of violence, evil, and pardon, Benjamin builds a convincing case for the...

In this book, Rodolphe Gasche returns to some of the founding texts of deconstruction to propose a new and broader way of understanding it--not as an operation or method to reach an elusive outside, or beyond, of metaphysics, but as something that takes place within it. Rather than unraveling metaphysics, deconstruction loosens its binary and hierarchical conceptual structure. To make this case, Gasche focuses on the concepts of force and violence in the work of Jacques Derrida, looking to his essays "Force and Signification" and "Force of Law," and his reading on Of Grammatology in...

Translated here for the first time into English, this text furnishes a new window into the final phase of Fichte's career. Delivered in the summer of 1812 at the newly founded University of Berlin, Fichte's lectures on ethics explore some of the key concepts and issues in his evolving system of radical idealism. Addressing moral theory, the theory of education, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of religion, Fichte engages both directly and indirectly with some of his most important contemporaries and philosophical rivals, including Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Benjamin D. Crowe's...

In Ecstasy, Catastrophe, David Farrell Krell provides insight into two areas of Heidegger's thought: his analysis of ecstatic temporality in Being and Time (1927) and his "political" remarks in the recently published Black Notebooks (1931-1941). The first part of Krell's book focuses on Heidegger's interpretation of time, which Krell takes to be one of Heidegger's greatest philosophical achievements. In addition to providing detailed commentary on ecstatic temporality, Krell considers Derrida's analysis of ekstasis in his first seminar on Heidegger, taught in Paris...

The last two decades have seen a renaissance and reappraisal of Schelling's remarkable body of philosophical work, moving beyond explications and historical study to begin thinking with and through Schelling, exploring and developing the fundamental issues at stake in his thought and their contemporary relevance. In this book, Jason M. Wirth seeks to engage Schelling's work concerning the philosophical problem of the relationship of time and the imagination, calling this relationship Schelling's practice of the wild. Focusing on the questions of nature, art, philosophical religion...

A new translation of the third and most sustained version of Schelling's magnum opus, this great heroic poem is a genealogy of time. Anticipating Heidegger, as well as contemporary debates about post-modernity and the limits of dialectical thinking, Schelling struggles with the question of time as the relationship between poetry and philosophy. Thinking in the wake of Hegel, although trying to think beyond his grasp, this extraordinary work is a poetic and philosophical address of difference, of thinking's relationship to its inscrutable ground.

Contemporary thought often claims the "death of the subject," and postmodernists typically contend that the standpoint of human subjectivity has been surpassed as a foundation for philosophy. A proper appreciation of these influential claims requires an understanding of the main tradition in which the standpoint of subjectivity was articulated, namely the classical philosophy of German Idealism. This book provides such an understanding.

The authors assess what is dead and what is alive today in the philosophy of subjectivity, and offer the most thorough study available on the background...

God and the Self in Hegel proposes a reconstruction of Hegel's conception of God and analyzes the significance of this reading for Hegel's idealistic metaphysics. Paolo Diego Bubbio argues that in Hegel's view, subjectivism--the tenet that there is no underlying "true" reality that exists independently of the activity of the cognitive agent--can be avoided, and content can be restored to religion, only to the extent that God is understood in God's relation to human beings, and human beings are understood in their relation to God. Focusing on traditional problems in theology and the...