The Destruction of Reason

The Destruction of Reason PDF Author: Georg Lukacs
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839761849
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 929

Book Description
How Western philosophy lost its innocence: from Enlightenment to fascism The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukács’s trenchant criticism of certain strands of philosophy after Marx and the role they played in the rise of National Socialism: ‘Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy,’ as he put it. Starting with the revolutions of 1848, his analysis spans post-Hegelian philosophy and sociology. The great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, neo-Hegelians such as Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm Dilthey, and the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre come in for a share of criticism, but the principal targets are Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Through these thinkers he shows in an unsparing analysis that, with almost no exceptions, the post-Hegelian tradition prepared the ground for fascist thought. Originally published in 1952, the book has been unjustly overlooked despite its centrality in Lukács’s work and its being one of the key texts in Western Marxism. This new edition features a historical introduction by Enzo Traverso, addressing the current rise of the far right across the world today.

The Destruction of Reason

The Destruction of Reason PDF Author: Georg Lucács
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789350024089
Category : Irrationalism (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This is a brilliant intellectual history of the philosophical positions and movements that in a way fermented to produce National Socialism. Rare erudition, wonderful stylizations, Lukasc is an amazing writer and an amazing mind. Sometimes his Leninist sympathies intrude, but for those interested in what led up to National Socialism in the field of philosophy, this text is amazingly well written and well researched. If you are interested in the history of German philosophy, to the point of being interested in minor thinkers, then this is worth reading. Ultimately, this is a book about Irrationalism, and how its various intellectual versions led to ''Hitlerism''. Read it in tandem with Hitler and Aesthetics ... another excellent book (not by GL though). The Epilogue is really interesting ... as he predicts that unlike Germany, which was interested in giving philosophical justifications to its irrationalism, the USA would, in confronting the USSR in the Cold War, unabashedly accept and exhibit its irrational interests in raw power. It's everywhere today.

The Destruction of Reason

The Destruction of Reason PDF Author: György Lukács
Publisher: Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press
ISBN: 9780391022478
Category : Philosophy, German
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description


The Destruction of Reason

The Destruction of Reason PDF Author: György Lukács
Publisher: Merlin Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy, German
Languages : en
Pages : 896

Book Description


Kierkegaard's Influence on Social-political Thought

Kierkegaard's Influence on Social-political Thought PDF Author: Jon Bartley Stewart
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781409434917
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
Kierkegaard has been traditionally characterized as a Christian writer who placed supreme importance on the inward religious life of each individual believer. His radical view seemed to many to undermine any meaningful conception of the community, society or the state. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to correct this image of Kierkegaard as an apolitical thinker. The present volume attempts to document the use of Kierkegaard by later thinkers in the context of social-political thought. It shows how his ideas have been employed by very different kinds of writers and activists with very different political goals and agendas. Many of the articles show that, although Kierkegaard has been criticized for his reactionary views on some social and political questions, he has been appropriated as a source of insight and inspiration by a number of later thinkers with very progressive, indeed, visionary political views.

Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason

Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason PDF Author: John Kadvany
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822380447
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
The Hungarian émigré Imre Lakatos (1922–1974) earned a worldwide reputation through the influential philosophy of science debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Sir Karl Popper. In Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason John Kadvany shows that embedded in Lakatos’s English-language work is a remarkable historical philosophy rooted in his Hungarian past. Below the surface of his life as an Anglo-American philosopher of science and mathematics, Lakatos covertly introduced novel transformations of Hegelian and Marxist ideas about historiography, skepticism, criticism, and rationality. Lakatos escaped Hungary following the failed 1956 Revolution. Before then, he had been an influential Communist intellectual and was imprisoned for years by the Stalinist regime. He also wrote a lost doctoral thesis in the philosophy of science and participated in what was criminal behavior in all but a legal sense. Kadvany argues that this intellectual and political past animates Lakatos’s English-language philosophy, and that, whether intended or not, Lakatos integrated a penetrating vision of Hegelian ideas with rigorous analysis of mathematical proofs and controversial histories of science. Including new applications of Lakatos’s ideas to the histories of mathematical logic and economics and providing lucid exegesis of many of Hegel’s basic ideas, Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason is an exciting reconstruction of ideas and episodes from the history of philosophy, science, mathematics, and modern political history.

Aesthetics and Politics

Aesthetics and Politics PDF Author: Ernst Bloch
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860917229
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law

Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law PDF Author: Annelise Riles
Publisher: Hart Publishing
ISBN: 1841132896
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
This book brings a new generation of comparative lawyers together to reflect on the character of their discipline.

Practicing Progress

Practicing Progress PDF Author: Richard E. Schade
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042021462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
The essay reads an Enlightened and modern critique of progress in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. With numerous references to other operas and texts, and with a storyline that emphasizes inevitable, yet mutable aspects of human nature, Cosi presents an ambivalent picture of the ways in which even the most disinterested and best-informed attitude toward the past can affect the future. At the same time, the opera seems to embrace the notion of freedom of choice without rejecting tradition or repetition. The essay also comments on the performance of Cosi in Zurich in 2000, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who often works with authentic period instruments.

Cultural Theory

Cultural Theory PDF Author: Tim Edwards
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1848607520
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
"Written by some of the leading thinkers in the field, the book is an excellent resource for longstanding and contemporary issues in cultural theory. Comprehensive and well-written." - David Oswell, Goldsmiths College This timely volume provides a framework for understanding the cultural turn in terms of the classical legacy, contemporary cultural theory and cultural analysis. It reveals the significance of Marxist humanism, Georg Simmel, the Frankfurt School, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, Giddens, Bauman, Foucault, Bourdieu and Baudrillard. Readers receive a dazzling, critical survey of some of the primary figures in the field. However, the book is much more than a Rough Guide tour through the 'great figures' in the field. Through an analysis of specific problems, such as transculturalism, transnationalsim, feminism, popular music and cultural citizenship, it demonstrates the relevance of cultural sociology in elucidating some of the key questions of our time.