Two centuries after his birth, Karl Marx is read almost solely through the lens of Marxism, his works examined for how they fit into the doctrine that was developed from them after his death. With "Marx's Dream", Tom Rockmore offers a much-needed a...

One of Hegel's most controversial and confounding claims is that "the real is rational and the rational is real". In this book, one of the world's leading scholars of Hegel, Jean-Francois Kervegan, offers a thorough analysis and explanation of that c...

The widespread understanding of language in the West is that it represents the world. This view, however, has not always been commonplace. In fact, it is a theory of language conceived by Plato, culminating in "The Sophist". In that dialogue Plato in...

Of all the senses, touch is the most ineffable – and the most neglected in Western culture, all but ignored by philosophers and artists over millennia. Yet it is also the sense that links us most intimately to the world around us, from our mother's c...

Liberalism, Miguel de Beistegui argues in "The Government of Desire", is best described as a technique of government directed towards the self, with desire as its central mechanism. Whether as economic interest, sexual drive, or the basic longing for...

At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willi...

It's right there in the Book of Job: "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward". Suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition – which leads to a question that has proved just as inescapable throughout the centuries: Why? Why do we...

"Modern Jewish thought" is often defined as a German affair, with interventions from Eastern European, American, and Israeli philosophers. The story of France's development of its own schools of thought has not been substantially treated outside the...

"Cultural Graphology" could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida's speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertoo...

German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as "The Human Condition", "The Origins of Tot...