This study is written by one of the world's leading experts on Simmel, and provides a fascinating set of insights into a thinker who is fast becoming recognized as the sociologist of modernity. It examines the relevance of his work in relation to contemporary debates on culture, aesthetics and modernity.

As Apel himself notes in his preface, the expression Transformation of Philosophy bears an ambiguity, naming both a change that took place in the development of philosophy as well as Apel's own systematic project. As a historical approach the title characterizes the transformation that philosophy has undergone in 20th century philosophy through an emphasis on the mediation and the configuring power of language. Apel focuses on three main currents, represented by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Peirce.

When Sociological Impressionism was first published in 1981, it was the first comprehensive study on Simmel's social theory to appear in English since 1925. A pioneering work, it did much to bring about the rediscovery of Georg Simmel as one of the key sociologists of the twentieth century. David Frisby provides a provocative introduction to aspects of Simmel's social theory, seriously challenging many interpretations of his work, most notably the view that Simmel produced a formal sociology. By drawing on many little-known essays and pieces by Simmel and his contemporaries, the book locates...

This book, first published in 1983 with a second edition in 1992, investigates the emergence of the sociology of knowledge in Germany in the critical period from 1918 to 1933. These years witnessed the development of distinctive paradigms centred on the works of Max Scheler, Georg Lukacs and Karl Mannheim. Each theorist sought to confront the base-superstructure models of the relationship between knowledge and society, which originated in Orthodox Marxism. David Frisbsy illustrates how these and other themes in the sociology of knowledge were contested through a detailed account of the...

Fragments of Modernity, first published in 1985, provides a critical introduction to the work of three of the most original German thinkers of the early twentieth century. In their different ways, all three illuminated the experience of the modern urban life, whether in mid nineteenth-century Paris, Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century or later as the vanguard city of the Weimar Republic. They related the new modes of experiencing the world to the maturation of the money economy (Simmel), the process of rationalization of capital (Kracauer) and the fantasy world of commodity fetishism...