Books & ideas

The great circle of philosophy

Alfio Nazareno Rizzo — 2024-06-25T15:17:55Z

In a book that is learned and ambitious as well as accessible, Vincent Citot compares the philosophies of eight different civilizations to understand their cyclical evolution from a religious to a scientific stage.

How Can One Be a Left Nietzschean?

Arnaud Sorosina — 2023-05-02T07:30:00Z

The Foucauldian analysis of the relations between power and knowledge draws on Nietzschean genealogy. For Jacques Bouveresse, however, Foucault, Deleuze, and their followers have put a left spin on the philosopher at the cost of a misinterpretation that leaves him perplexed.

Richard Rorty the Multi-Pragmatist

Stéphane Madelrieux — 2023-01-04T08:22:12Z

Rorty made conversation a philosophical genre in its own right, which led him to reject any distinctions he considered futile: between analytic and continental philosophy, between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, between philosophy and literature.

Spinoza as Groundwork for Writing Fiction

Steven Nadler — 2020-06-29T07:00:00Z

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 Her beautiful translation had remained unpublished until now.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.

How the History of Philosophy Was Born

Ariane Revel — 2020-04-30T07:00:00Z

The history of philosophy is a discipline in its own right that invented itself as such in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. But it is also an imperialist practice intended to mark the triumph of European reason. Catherine König-Pralong's book traces its history.

Summertime, and Reading Is Easy

Editorial Team — 2019-08-12T07:00:00Z

Books & Ideas is going on holiday for the summer. We will be back with new publications starting August 26^th. In the meantime, here is a selection of essays, interviews and reviews published over the past year.

Theories as Social Action

Florent Guénard — 2019-04-11T06:00:00Z

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.

Rousseau in Corsica

Christopher Kelly — 2019-02-07T07:00:00Z

Upon the request of Corsican leaders, Rousseau undertook the writing of what would later be published as Projet de constitution pour la Corse. This new critical edition shows that this unfinished work requires a new title and a new understanding of Rousseau's goals in undertaking it.

Derrida and the Marginality of the French Intellectual

Emile Chabal — 2013-07-11T07:30:00Z

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.