According to Camille Riquier, the Metaphysical Meditations are the “secret” to understanding Sartrean thought. Yet, can this bold thesis be extended to Sartre’s entire oeuvre?
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on ways to shift our intellectual categories.
The first English translator of Spinoza’s Ethics was a woman, and not any woman: the great novelist George Eliot who, before taking to writing fiction, had translated Feuerbach, David Strauss—and Spinoza. Her beautiful translation had remained unpublished until now. It has nothing to envy of the ones that followed.
Recurring typhus outbreaks among the poor in the 18th century reinforced the belief that plebeian bodies were in a constant state of putrefaction. Adopting a longue durée approach, Rotten Bodies offers a stimulating study of medical discourse on epidemic disease in the “long” 18th century.
For the first time, the Pléiade collection is publishing the work of a contemporary historian. This event celebrates the centennial of the birth of this great mediaevalist, a historian of mentalities who found a way to make historical knowledge accessible to a wider audience. Felipe Brandi, an expert on Duby, edited and annotated the book.
An Irish landowner, economist, philosopher and defender of women’s rights, William Thompson was one of the greatest Socialist figures before Marx. Nowadays neglected, his thought nevertheless has many echoes with important contemporary debates, from the critique of capitalism to the rise of feminism.
Should the history of intellectuals also be a history of ideas? François Dosse’s book reorients scholarship in this field by integrating ideas and high culture into the traditionally more sociologically informed history of French intellectuals.
By insisting on the need to consider philosophical works as interventions in the general, ongoing political debates of their time, Quentin Skinner has profoundly renewed the history of ideas. In this interview, he revisits the main themes of his work.
Edward Baring’s exciting reinterpretation of Derrida’s early years paints a picture of a postwar French elite that was both scintillating in its intellectual prowess and deeply parochial: it was a world in which Derrida thrived.
Creating connections has been the aim of Jean Starobinski’s work for more than half a century. His body of work is large and shifting, created in response to life, lying somewhere between the critical and the clinical. Books & Ideas met this citizen of the world at his house in Geneva, following the recent publication of three important books.
