modern philosophy essay

Modern Philosophy

(5 reviews)

Walter Ott, University of Virginia

Copyright Year: 2013

Publisher: BCcampus

Language: English

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Reviewed by Jeff Lavoie, Adjunct Professor, Middlesex Community College on 5/26/21

This book deals with the major texts from the "modern" time period; however, it is more of an anthology than it is a textbook. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

This book deals with the major texts from the "modern" time period; however, it is more of an anthology than it is a textbook.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

While the majority of this book are well accepted translations, the introductions privided were accurate in my opinion.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

This is one of the selling points of this work as the author provides questions at the end of each section that engages the reader to grasp the key ideas presented. My only concern was that these were not applied to more recent topics.

Clarity rating: 4

This book is primarily an anthology of accesible texts; however, the author did not attempt to clarify them for introductory students.

Consistency rating: 5

The terms used are consistent with philosophical discourse.

Modularity rating: 4

Yes, this book is divided into clear sections of primary source material.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

This book is arranged chronologically which ensures a logical structure.

Interface rating: 5

There is nothing that distracts the reader though, personally, I am not a fan of multiple italicized sections.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

There were no major grammatical issues in this work.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

This is an obvious issue in this text; however, to be fair this is not the author's "fault" as there is not much diversity in "modern philosophy" (acknowkedged anyways). It has only been over the past century where more diverse voices have entered the conversation.

Overall it is what it is- an anthology of modern philosophy.

Reviewed by Robert Morton-Ranney, Adjunct Faculty, Massachusetts Maritime Academy on 6/22/20

This book covers the area promised (also see Cultural comments below). Its best use could be as a companion text to other more explanatory material, especially if it is included in introductory classes. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

This book covers the area promised (also see Cultural comments below). Its best use could be as a companion text to other more explanatory material, especially if it is included in introductory classes.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

No difficulties were noted.

Texts as important as these will always be relevant.

Clarity rating: 5

The readings are laid out in a way that makes the book as a whole very easy to navigate. There are points at which a little more introductory explanation would be helpful. Aristotle’s prose, for instance, will seem quite dense to students coming at it for the first time.

Consistency rating: 4

As the Preface indicates, questions appear after some of the readings and these are very helpful. A question or more after each reading would be more helpful still.

Modularity rating: 5

The text is excellent at offering bite-sized chunks.

No apparent issues.

No difficulties.

It will be obvious, painfully so to many, that this is another text exclusively featuring white males. The relevant issues are formidable, but they must be recognized.

There are points in the learning process when there is no substitute for the real thing, and having significant works carefully culled does a great service.

Reviewed by Alyssa Adamson, Adjunct Instructor, Northeastern Illinois University on 4/8/20

The beginning glossary and mini introduction to logic is useful, especially given that even in a focused class on the history of modern philosophy, this course may be student’s first philosophy class and text. It is great to warm the students up... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

The beginning glossary and mini introduction to logic is useful, especially given that even in a focused class on the history of modern philosophy, this course may be student’s first philosophy class and text. It is great to warm the students up with some of these specialized terms even before reading since they will become central to so many of the thinkers included in the text. Getting the analytic versus synthetic distinction will pay off loads by the time you get to Kant’s Prolegomena. Having students get strong on argument structures before jumping into Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, etc. will be really helpful. I haven’t always done this focused work in the beginning of teaching Modern Philosophy (as I would if I was teaching Critical Thinking or Logic) so this aspect of this text is helpful.

One of my favorite aspects of this texts is that is offers links to free full texts of all the books explicitly covered, as well and books it does not cover (e.g. main texts from Aristotle and Aquinas). This is easy since there are decent translations of those are already in the public domain, but students so not always know this fact. This will be useful for students doing extra reading or research for papers and/or exams.

There is a handy background chapter that gives an overview of Aristotle and Aquinas to set up Descartes. When I’ve taught this in the past I have done a similar version of this on my own, but it is nice that it is already baked into the book. There are short introductory notes and small but well-selected excerpts from Aristotle’s Categories, Physics, and Posterior Analytics. Then from Aquinas, there are short introductions and excerpts from On the Eternity of the World, Summa Contra Gentiles, and Summa Theologicae.

This text offers the “hits” of primary texts from Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Most of the texts are helpfully abridged but a few are left unabridged e.g. Descartes’ Meditations, Hume’s Enquiry, and Kant’s Prolegomena. It is strange that Leibniz, Hobbes, and Rousseau are missing, but instructors can add other figures that they fit depending on their course’s focus on political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, etc. Unfortunately, there are no early modern European women philosophers nor interlocutors of the male philosophers included here (e.g. Anne Conway, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Damaris Masham, Mary Wollstonecraft). While “new” in a sense to many philosophers as new material is just now coming out on his work and life, the text also leaves out Anton Wilhelm Amo the Ghanian philosopher who got a PhD in philosophy in Germany writing a critique of Descartes in 1734.

My only other complaint with what the text provides are its short introductions to each of the philosophers. They are very short introductions and do not go into the social and political milieu of the philosophers which would greatly help students to understand the context of these texts. Hopefully teachers using this book will have the background knowledge to offer the social and political backdrop of each of the texts as well as be able to situate the debates and questions in a global context. Even if the focus is on modern European philosophy, it did not happen in a vacuum, but rather within in the context of European colonization of the Americas and Africa, conquest, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and intra-European wars which did set the conditions and questions for scientific and philosophical knowledge production. This is an issue with most (maybe all) modern philosophy textbooks—not something special to this one—but it is worth mentioning nonetheless.

This text appears to present as accurately as possible the concepts and figures it introduces, even if these introductions are sometimes too short in my opinion and miss setting up the boarder social and political contexts of the philosophers and debates. The translations it uses are fine and up-to-date.

This text would be relevant to any lower or upper level undergraduate modern philosophy course or even in an introduction to philosophy course. Because of the nature of classic philosophy texts, there shouldn’t be anything “out-of-date” besides the omissions of thinkers as mentioned in the comprehensiveness section.

There are no major issues with clarity in the text. While the introductions and summaries of the materials included are short, they are clearly written and should be understood by undergraduate students. But again, longer background summaries and introductions will head off confusions students will have with the potential lack of historical background knowledge.

The book provides a survey of many different thinkers, so each section will in some sense be a self-contained whole on that particular thinker’s writings, but the presentation and supplemental material are consistent.

One of my favorite things about this text is the way it breaks down all the chapters into manageable sections and includes reading comprehension questions and exercises after each main section. Not many modern philosophy compilation textbooks are “modular” in this way so this is a really helpful aspect of this text. Because there is no attempt to flesh out a long background narrative, you can pick and choose easily which sections of the book you want to cover without missing any links in some narrative chain. This is both a strength and a weakness, good because it leaves you space to organize your course as you wish, a weakness if you do want to try to situate the thinkers in some kind of historical analysis.

There is a small set of questions asking for students to identify analytic versus synthetic statements after the glossary which is fine but could be expanded to cover more of the terms presented in the glossary. Teachers can make their own quizzes to expand assessment of the mini-logic part of the introduction to also include working on coming up with valid and invalid arguments and identifying normative versus descriptive claims.

The Glossary of Philosophical Positions and the Glossary of Principles I am certain will have students flipping back to them as the course moves through this text. I really appreciate that these elements are in the front and not the back of the book so that they can be addressed upfront in outlining the issues and debates in modern philosophy. Otherwise the book is organized historically from Descartes to Kant, which makes sense. Teachers that want to move thematically can easily remix the order.

Easy to use interface, I especially liked the hyperlinks to free versions of the full-texts of the included and not wholly included philosophy books.

No notable grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 1

As mentioned in the comprehensiveness section, while this is a book focusing on European modern philosophy it is missing any women European philosophers who were important interlocutors with the male philosophers included. It does not include any non-European (or even Spanish or Portuguese) philosophers of the same historical moment. The other missing aspect is grounding the main philosophical debates in a social, political, and global context. There are collections that include thinkers listed here like Locke, Hume, and Kant on race and gender specifically that can be used as supplements to this text. It should be problematized that many (if not all) of the philosophers included in this book did not think women or non-European peoples could be fully rational, philosophy, or even human—and that many of them had philosophical arguments (even if they were bad ones) about these points and not merely accidentally contingent outdated views. Looking at the difference between the sexism and/or racism of rationalists versus empiricists can be an interesting discussion after studying the texts included in this book supplemented with some of their other texts that more directly address issues of gender and race.

Something that could be added to future versions of this text could be one or two concluding chapters that would touch on how ideas, concepts, and debates in modern philosophy have persisted in the present and/or informed contemporary philosophers. This could easily be done by the instructor, but it also wouldn’t be bad to add some contemporary resources for students at the end of the book.

Reviewed by Aaron Boyden, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Rhode Island College on 5/21/18

The book is focused on the early modern period, and generally presents the usual suspects. It does seem to devote more attention to the empiricists than to the rationalists; maybe a little Leibniz would have been a good addition to improve the... read more

The book is focused on the early modern period, and generally presents the usual suspects. It does seem to devote more attention to the empiricists than to the rationalists; maybe a little Leibniz would have been a good addition to improve the balance? I did like the inclusion of Aristotle and Aquinas as background to help understand the beginnings of the period. I also liked that the entirety of Descartes’ Meditations was included, as I think that work is one of those that particularly suffers from the loss of context when heavily excerpted.

It is primarily a collection of classic texts. There do not seem to be any particular problems with the translations, and the additional material used to introduce the classic texts seems accurate enough.

The classic texts are not going to change, and the book is mostly a collection of those. The discussions of the issues raised by the classic texts is mostly focused on long-standing, well-established interpretations, rather than the latest scholarly fashions. It seems likely to be useful for a long time.

A lot of the supplemental material was quite brief. This was perhaps out of a desire to let the classic texts speak for themselves, but of course the classic texts are in many cases quite difficult, and I thought some of the supplemental material was perhaps too brief to be entirely helpful.

Since it is a compilation of classic texts, of course the various original authors are quite diverse in their concerns and styles. The organization varied somewhat in that some texts were excerpted and how much cutting and reorganization was done with the excerpted texts varied, but the choices of when and how to do that seemed reasonably well motivated. The supplemental material was consistent.

While there is (as there should be) an attempt to highlight some of the connections between the various items included, there does not seem to be any attempt to force things into an overall narrative; it seems well designed for use by instructors who wish to pick and choose which parts to employ.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

I’m not sure how useful the glossary of philosophical positions at the start was; I felt like that material could have been better distributed later in the text as the particular issues arose. Otherwise, the order seems to be primarily chronological, which is reasonable enough for a compilation of classic texts.

No notable problems with the interface.

No notable problems with grammar.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

That it is focused on early modern Western philosophy has some inevitable consequences. There are ways it could have tried to be more inclusive (maybe discussing the objections of Elisabeth of Bohemia in the Descartes section) or connected the discussion to a broader world context (e.g. look at theories of possible Buddhist influence on Hume). But presumably the interest in the early modern texts is primarily motivated by their subsequent influence, and this text covers the most influential texts and discusses the issues that turned out to be influential.

Reviewed by Jim Sharp, Adjunct Professor, Colorado State University - Pueblo on 2/1/18

This book serves primarily as a reader in western philosophy during the modern period, covering major thinkers from Descartes to Kant. In addition, excerpts from Aristotle and Aquinas are supplied in a background chapter. The book does an... read more

This book serves primarily as a reader in western philosophy during the modern period, covering major thinkers from Descartes to Kant. In addition, excerpts from Aristotle and Aquinas are supplied in a background chapter. The book does an excellent job of providing substantial primary material from the philosophers mentioned above, as well as Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

Although this selection of philosophers is not exhaustive, clearly the selections presented here represent the major themes and trends in western philosophical thought during this time period. The selections chosen provide good entry points into study of significant areas of philosophy: metaphysics, methodology, epistemology, and the nature of the mind/body connection.

The authors have supplied brief, helpful introductory notes to each figure and specific text which accurately place the excerpts in relationship to one another and identify the major themes being dealt with in each one.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

Since the focus of the work is on primary source readings, it is likely to maintain its relevance for many years. The introductory notes are mostly focused on the identification of topics addressed in the selections, and therefore avoid the problems and distractions that might be raised by bringing in scholarly questions and controversies of the moment. Such issues could easily be addressed within course discussions by a knowledgeable instructor where they are relevant to the selected excerpts.

The text is clear and succinct. The introductory chapter provides clear definitions and explanations of a variety of relevant philosophical terms, making the work as a whole accessible for general education and introductory courses aimed at students who may not have already had exposure to the subject.

Since the book presents selections from eight different philosophers, whose work was written over a span of more than a dozen centuries, there are significant variations in terminology, style and constructions of arguments to be found. The introductory notes within the selections, as well as the questions supplied in each section, are designed to help students see the connections between each philosopher and bridge the differences between each thinker's work.

The modular nature of the text is one of its most useful strengths. Selections from each philosopher are divided into manageable chunks, with helpful discussion and constructive questions at the end of each section. These questions are designed to make students think through the material they have just read, and allow them to check their own understanding of the material at frequent intervals.

The selections are presented in chronological order, which is appropriate to a work like this one which explores the history and development of particular ideas. The notes and commentary supplied, along with the questions for understanding, provide background for the connections between the selections. The background chapter presenting selections from Aristotle and Aquinas supplies the necessary historical details to relate their thoughts to the later modern period which is the focus of the text.

Interface rating: 4

The interface is clear, self-explanatory, and includes useful links between sections which allow the reader to move from one excerpt to another when connections are being made between multiple selections. There seem to be a small number of older links which should have been edited out, but nothing which hinders the usefulness of the text and its links.

The grammar of the text was fine and free of errors or confusion.

Since this is a text that is focused on western philosophy, it has a clear cultural location. The selections given reflect the cultural and historical contexts of the various authors, and must be read with that in mind. The focus of the work is on the history and development of philosophical ideas, and the supplemental text and introductory materials reflect that focus. Arguably, the authors could have supplied some discussion of the historical and cultural context of western philosophy, but such discussion is not demanded by a text of this nature.

Overall, this text is an excellent reader in modern western philosophy. It could be a valuable resource for an introductory course, or a good supplemental text in a readings or seminar course for more advanced students of philosophy.

Table of Contents

• 2. Minilogic and Glossary
• 3. Background to Modern Philosophy
• 4. René Descartes (1596–1650)
• 5. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)
• 6. John Locke's (1632–1704) Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
• 7. George Berkeley (1685–1753)
• 8. David Hume's (1711–1776) Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• 9. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This is a textbook in modern philosophy. It combines readings from primary sources with two pedagogical tools. Paragraphs in italics introduce figures and texts. Numbered study questions (also in italics) ask students to reconstruct an argument or position from the text, or draw connections among the readings. And I have added an introductory chapter (Chapter 0 – Minilogic and Glossary), designed to present the basic tools of philosophy and sketch some principles and positions. The immediate goal is to encourage students to grapple with the ideas rather than passing their eyes over the texts. This makes for a better classroom experience and permits higher-level discussions. Another goal is to encourage collaboration among instructors, as they revise and post their own versions of the book.

About the Contributors

Walter Ott is an associate professor in Corcoran Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia.

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Philosophy Graduate Student Portfolio Papers Guide

Introduction.

• Introductory Research Tips
• Detailed Research Tips
• Databases & Resources
• Ancient Philosophy
• Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

General Resources - Modern

Women philosophers, mary wollstonecraft, francis bacon, thomas hobbes, rené descartes, baruch spinoza, gottfried wilhelm leibniz, giambattista vico, jean-jacques rousseau, immanuel kant, sor juana ines de la cruz.

• 19th Century Philosophy (WIP)
• 20th Century and Beyond (WIP)

Items in  Bold  are available via online access from Emory's collections.

Last Updated: February 2022 by Kyle Tanaka

The following list contains resources helpful to studying Modern authors in general, not any authors specifically.

• Contains Latin editions of numerous Modern authors, including Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Spinoza, and more.
• Headed by Jonathan Bennett, Early Modern Texts contains free editions and translations of numerous texts from the Modern period. Note that Bennett's translations "are faithful to the content of the originals, but are plainer and more straightforward in manner."

The above volume, specified by the Graduate Student Handbook, contains the following selections:

​ Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia

Correspondence with Descartes

Margaret Cavendish

Philosophical Letters

Anne Viscountess Conway

The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy

Damaris Cudworth (née Masham)

Correspondence with Leibniz

Mary Astell

A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

Catharine Trotter Cockburn

A Defense of Mr. Locke's Essay of Human Understanding

Lady Mary Shepard

Essays on the Perception of an External Universe

Some of these texts are available online through Jonathan Bennett's "Early Modern Texts" site:

Anne Viscountess Conway,  The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy

​ Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Correspondence with Descartes

Online Resources:

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Princess Elisabeth
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Margaret Cavendish
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Anne Conway
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Damaris Masham
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Mary Astell
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Catharine Trotter Cockburn
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Mary Shepard ​
• PhilPapers - History: Feminist Philosophy Category Page
• A number of the above figures have individual category pages, including Astell, Cavendish, and Conway.
• A site devoted to the lives and ideas of women philosophers in the Modern period. Includes entries on Astell, Cavendish, Conway, and more.

Bibliographies:

• Covers a very wide range of figures writing during the Modern period, including some of the authors listed above.
• Oxford Bibliographies Page - Astell
• Oxford Bibliographies Page - Cavendish

Secondary Literature:

The following selections concern women in the Modern Philosophy period broadly, without necessarily focusing on any particular figure in the above volume. 

Items in  Bold  are available via online access from Emory's collections.

• Examines the role of religion in forming feminist arguments in 17th century England.
• Traces the complex history of women's responses to Cartesian philosophy through figures like Elisabeth, Astell, Cavendish, and others.
• Situates women thinkers such as Cavendish and Astell (among others) as important voices in the development of political thought in the Modern period.
• Not restricted to the Modern period, but devotes a chapter each to Anne Conway and Mary Astell.
• Eileen O'Neill has a chapter specifically on "the problem of disappearing ink," i.e. the problem of recovering women philosophers from the Modern period and addressing their suppression (if not outright erasure) from the history of philosophy.
• Focuses on the role of women in the establishment of modern science.
• Though slightly older, nonetheless a solid introduction to the political thought of early feminists in England.
• Volume III in a series surveying the importance of women in philosophy. Includes a entries on a number of the above figures, each of which includes a short biography and overview of that figure's major ideas.

The above edition, from Norton Critical Editions, includes both the text and helpful contextual material, such as information about Wollstonecraft, the historical period, and responses.

The critical edition of the  Vindication of the Rights of Woman  is found in Wollstonecraft's Complete Works:

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry (Version 1)
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry (Version 2)
• PhilPapers - Mary Wollstonecraft Category Page ​
• Oxford Bibliographies Page
• Though now slightly outdated, nevertheless a useful resource for various works on Wollstonecraft. Todd herself is a leading expert on Wollstonecraft.
• An influential collection containing contributions from many major Wollstonecraft scholars. Also contains a bibliography.
• Originally published in 1798 by Wollstonecraft's husband a year after her death, this work shaped history's reception of her work, especially the emphasis on  Vindication of the Rights of Woman  as her central work.
• An influential study of Wollstonecraft. Focuses on the development of her thought across her career as a writer, and problematizes any straightforward inclusion of Wollstonecraft in the Western canon.
• As with most Cambridge Companions, this volume is a collection of essays on a variety of topics concerning Wollstonecraft. The essays are generally from leading scholars, and taken in sum are a solid introduction to both Wollstonecraft and scholarship on her.
• Examines Wollstonecraft's intellectual influence, especially the kinds of political discourse her writings made possible.
• Although not specifically on Wollstonecraft, Sen's treatment of Wollstonecraft vis-a-vis Edmund Burke (and John Rawls) helped situate her as an important political thinker, especially on justice.
• Part one examines Wollstonecraft's reflections on the imagination and sexual difference, while part two focuses on the social and political context informing Wollstonecraft's thought.
• A comprehensive intellectual biography by a leading scholar of Wollstonecraft.

The Spedding edition of Bacon's works, above, has long reigned as the standard edition of Bacon's works. The  Novum Organum  can be found in the first volume; click here to go to it. However, the still-in-progress Oxford series of Bacon's works will likely replace the Spedding editions once complete. The volume containing the  Novum Organon  is already released as volume XI of that series:

Bacon, Francis. The Oxford Francis Bacon XI: The Instauratio magna , Part II: Novum organum.  Edited by Graham Rees with Maria Wakely, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Click here to go to page 1 of the  Novum Organum .

• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry
• PhilPapers - Francis Bacon Category Page ​
• Part of a series headed by Jonathan Bennett making Modern philosophy texts freely available online.
• Provides access to--among other things--a database covering articles, books, and other publications on Bacon.
• Though slightly older and a bit enamored with Bacon as an individual, Anderson's work is still a useful introduction and overview of Bacon's career and works.
• An influential work that attempts to give an account of Bacon's overall project.
• Along with Horkheimer and Adorno's treatment of Bacon in  Dialectic of Enlightenment , helped establish the reading of Bacon as laying the ground for the mastery, exploitation, and subjugation of nature.
• Given an overview of Bacon's thought and its pivotal role in ushering in the period of Modern philosophy.
• Argues that the science promoted by Bacon was less radical than it might seem, and that Bacon was attempting to reconcile older traditions--including some occult ones--with new methods.
• Argues that Bacon's project of reforming natural philosophy was, ultimately, to help increase the efficacy and efficiency of government. A somewhat controversial interpretation.
• A collection of essays by leading scholars on Bacon, covering a range of topics. 
• Argues that Bacon is a key figure in the definition of the concept of "objectivity."
• A collection of influential articles on Bacon and his works. Of particular note is Dean's essay on Bacon qua historian.

The still-in-progress series of Hobbes's complete works, edited by Noel Malcolm and published by Oxford University Press, is becoming the new standard; the edition of the  Leviathan  is already available and includes extensive editorial notes (comprising volume 1) and the original Latin. Prior to that, the standard English and Latin editions (still used occasionally) were edited by William Molesworth and published 1839-1845. Long since out of copyright, these editions are easily found online ( see here, for example ).

• PhilPapers - Thomas Hobbes Category Page ​
• A digital version of the 11 volume series of Hobbes's works, edited by WIlliam Molesworth
• An annotated bibliography describing works by and about Hobbes from 1679-1976.
• Not a bibliography per se, but helpful as an overview of the scholarly debates surrounding Hobbes from  the 1970s to 1990.
• A classic and influential work on Hobbes's mechanical conception of nature.
• Discusses the connection between Hobbes's materialism and determinism, before shifting to a discussion of the political and moral import of those topics.
• Interprets the  Leviathan  anachronistically, in terms of modern game theory. Founded further considerations of Hobbes's work in this vein.
• A broad survey of secondary literature on Hobbes. 122 articles published in 4 volumes.
• A collection of essays by a major scholar on Hobbes (and the current lead editor of the critical edition of Hobbes's works). 
• A controversial work, focusing on Hobbes's ideas concerning religion. Edwin Curley and Jeffrey R. Collins are notable critics.
• Includes Oakeshott's introduction to a 1946 edition of the  Leviathan , a clearly-written and influential interpretation of the work as a whole.
• Focuses on the scientific issues (and their political and religious implications) arising from Boyle's air pump experiments. An often-discussed and influential work.
• A collection of essays on Hobbes's thought; many of these essays have been influential in subsequent interpretations of Hobbes (especially amongst the so-called "Cambridge school"). Of particular note are the introduction, which is a brief but helpful intellectual biography, and "History and Ideology in the English revolution."
• A collection of essays from major scholars marking the 350th anniversary of the publication of  Leviathan .
• A collection of articles surveying major themes in the  Leviathan , written by experts in their respective areas.
• A difficult but influential work that situates Hobbes in a history of thinking about natural right.
• Strauss and his readings are often the target of critiques by the Cambridge school of interpretation (such as those of Skinner)

Descartes's  Selected Writings is the collection specified by the Graduate Student Handbook. It includes:

​ Rules for the direction of our native intelligence

Discourse on the method

Meditations on First philosophy

Objections and replies

Principles of philosophy

Comments on a certain broadsheet

The passions of the soul

These selections are pulled from the longer set of standard English translations of Descartes's work:

Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes . 3 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge University Press, 1984–1991.

The critical editions for Descartes's works in French and Latin, are found in the following series:

Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes . 11 vols. Edited by Paul Tannery and Charles Adam. Paris: Vrin, 1964–1976.

This is usually cited as "AT" (Adam and Tannery), followed by volume number and page number.

Example: AT 6:14

• PhilPapers - René Descartes Category Page​
• Contains the French text of both the  Meditations  and the  Discourse on Method
• Contains the Latin edition of the  Meditations
• In French. Publishes an annual report by the Centre d’études cartésiennes, which contains a bibliography of recent work on Descartes and Cartesianism (the report is usually in volume 1).
• Rather than analyzing the epistemological issues in Descartes's thought, examines the metaphysics at work instead--albeit still with a heavy dose of epistemology.
• A monumental work that, despite its age (originally published 1868), remains one of the best resources for tracing the influence of Descartes on his contemporaries and followers.
• Scans of the original work can be found online here .
• A helpful volume comprised of essays on a wide range of topics, themes, and issues in Descartes's works. All the articles are written by prominent scholars in their field, and provide a good foundation for further research.
• Argues against the view that the mind is immaterial substance in Descartes, drawing especially from later works like  The Passions of the Soul .
• An influential reading of Descartes, focusing on the role of demons, dreams, and madness in Descartes's epistemology.
• Originally published in French in 1953, attempts to follow Descartes's step-by-step reasoning in the  Meditations . Along the way, notes where and how Descartes deviates from the path.
• An extremely detailed (almost paragraph by paragraph) examination of the  Meditations . Includes sections providing historical context and notes the inheritance and influence of Descartes on subsequent figures.
• A collection of essays by a major scholar of Descartes. Especially noteworthy are his essays on Descartes and human nature.
• A classic study of Descartes, providing an overview of the philosopher's project and views. A common starting point for many subsequent scholarly discussions.
• Marion's PhD dissertation, originally published in French in 1975. Examines the role of Scholastic and Aristotelian traditions in informing Descartes's  Rules for the Direction of the Mind . 
• Compares the role and extent of skepticism vis-a-vis method in both al-Ghazālī and Descartes, emphasizing the philosophical concerns informing such projects.
• An influential work written by a notable philosopher in his own right. Focuses especially on the epistemological issues in Descartes's thought and its basis in absolute certainty.
• A collection of essays focusing on Descartes's theory of the passions and moral theory, written by notable Descartes scholars.
• Analyzes in great detail the arguments Descartes offers, tracing the trajectory of his premises towards his conclusions in the Meditations . Still a commonly-read work.

The standard English translation of the  Ethics  is by Curley, found in volume 1 of the  Collected Works . Though not standard, Parkinson's translation is also worth consulting.

For the Latin, the standard edition is the Spinoza  Opera , edited by Carl Gebhardt. More recently, there is also the edition of the  Ethics  discovered in the Vatican archives.

• Spruit, Leen, and Pina Totaro, editors. The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica. Brill, 2011.
• PhilPapers - Spinoza Category Page ​
• The Latin text of the  Ethics  from Wikisouce. Not a critical edition, but useful for searches and the like.
• A digital and multilingual edition of the  Ethics . Includes a search tool.
• Attempts to offer as comprehensive a bibliography on Spinoza as possible, including works in all languages and mediums. Available in German and English.
• A classic overview of Spinoza's entire philosophical system, with emphasis placed especially on the  Ethics  and  TTP .
• A detailed study on Spinoza's arguments in the  Ethics and potential problems that arise with them.
• An influential classic by a major Spinoza scholar and the translator of the standard  Collected Works . Focuses especially on the method of the  Ethics .
• Focuses on the relation between the mind and body and how Spinoza approaches the mind-body problem.
• A dense work, but an influential reading of Spinoza on eternity, duration, and time.
• Focuses on Spinoza's moral philosophy, especially on the role of freedom.
• An influential article that challenges prevailing readings of Axiom 4 of Book 1 of the  Ethics . 
• A guide to Spinoza's major work, meant to introduce the reader to its major themes and concepts.
• A very thorough treatment of Spinoza's epistemology.

The  Discourse on Metaphysics  is the work of Leibniz specified by the Graduate Student Handbook. The closest thing to a standard edition of Leibniz's works in English is the 2-volume  Philosophical Papers and Letters: A Selection , translated and edited by Loemker; the  Discourse on Metaphysics  is in Volume 2. Other editions (see below) also contain the  Discourse :

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Essays . Edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, Hackett, 1989.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays . Edited and translated by Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew, Hackett, 1991.

The critical edition of Leibniz's works is the still-ongoing   Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe , edited by the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin; it is not scheduled to be completed until 2050. Fortunately, most of the major works are already available. For some of the later Leibniz works, however, one must consult the Gerhardt volumes

• PhilPapers - Leibniz Category Page ​ ​
• Contains links to a number of resources related to Leibniz, including texts, bibliographies, biographies, articles, and more. ​
• Free online translations of Leibniz's works (does not contain the  Discourse on Metaphysics , however).
• A collection of links to online editions of Leibniz's works, in English, German, Latin, and French.
• A bibliography of secondary literature on Leibniz published through 1980.
• A major work of scholarship on Leibniz that focuses on Leibniz's views on determinism, God, and substance. 
• A helpful biography that deftly deals with the huge range of intellectual pursuits Leibniz had across his life.
• Situates Leibniz and his philosophy in the theological debates of his day, especially on the topics of the Eucharist and predestination.
• A collection of essays from leading Leibniz scholars covering the major issues and topics in Leibniz's works.
• A solid overview and introduction to many of the major topics in Leibniz's thought.
• Much of Leibniz's philosophy was expressed through his correspondence with others. This collection of essays gives overviews of many of the more significant correspondences Leibniz had. 
• A detailed examination of Leibniz's metaphysics and its evolution across the course of his life.
• An influential work in Anglo-American Leibniz studies that helped revive interest in the thinker. Focuses especially on Leibniz's logic and metaphysics. It should be noted many subsequent scholars have critiqued Russell's reading.
• Focuses especially on the theodicy problem as at the heart of Leibniz's philosophy and metaphysics.
• A more recent collection of essays from a newer generation of Leibniz scholars. Some essays are a bit technical for someone new to Leibniz's thought.

The Clarendon edition of the  Essay  is standard. It is part of a longer 37 volume set still being published by Oxford/Clarendon of the entirety of Locke's works, correspondence, and manuscripts. As of this writing, the  Two Treatises of Government  (only the second of which is specified by the portfolio guide) is not yet available from that series. However, the Cambridge edition, above, is commonly used.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Locke's Political Philosophy
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry - Locke: Political Philosophy
• PhilPapers - John Locke Category Page ​
• A free online edition of the 1824 edition of Locke's works, which includes both the  Essay  and  Two Treatises .
• Though a bit older, a helpful guide to the enormous volume of secondary literature on Locke.
• An extensive annotated bibliography covering secondary literature on Locke from 1689-1982.
• Maintained by John Attig and containing thousands of entries on Locke's works and its various editions along with a huge list of secondary literature. Offers both a subject and name index, as well as a "Recently added" page.
• Originally published in 1937. A classic of Locke scholarship that influenced views on Locke for decades. Focuses on Locke's epistemology especially.
• A collection of essays spanning four volumes; contains some of the most influential scholarship on Locke from 1991-2004.
• A very thorough treatment of major topics in Locke's thought, especially in the  Essay , and a classic of Locke scholarship.
• A collection of essays from leading scholars on a wide range of topics and themes in Locke's thought.
• A fairly standard introduction to the whole of Locke's thought.
• Introduces and contextualizes many of the major themes in the  Essay . 
• A brief introduction to the major themes in Locke's thought. Aimed at beginners.
• A more recent treatment that explores the depths and motivations of Locke's metaphysics.
• The standard biography of Locke's life.

There are a few editions of the  Treatise  considered standard. The first, edited by Selby-Bigge and revised by Nidditch, is the classic 1739-40 edition and is typically the one used by scholars. The second, edited by Norton and Norton, is also used, but aims more at a student audience.

Hume also wrote an abstract to the  Treatise  in 1740.

• Hume, David. An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature.  Archon Books, 1965.
• PhilPapers - David Hume Category Page ​
• The official publication of the Hume Society. Many older volumes are available for free.
• Full access is available through Emory's collection .
• Contains numerous works of Hume available for free online, including the standard edition of the  Treatise  by Selby-Bigge.
• from 1977 to 2010,  Hume Studies  published an annual bibliography of literature on Hume.
• Contains a comprehensive bibliography of writings Hume published, as well as early responses to Hume's work.
• Baier has written extensively on justice and promises; this volume collects some of her most important work on those topics along with a few new essays.
• A classic work that examines the historical context of Hume's political views.
• An often-discussed article that examines the role of moral obligation and artificial virtues vis-a-vis the figure of the Sensible Knave from Hume's  Enquiry .
• A collection of some of the most influential articles in Hume scholarship of the last ~50 years.
• Originally published in 1941, this work ushered in the modern era of Hume scholarship. A milestone work, it is still a common reference point for all subsequent Hume scholarship.
• Part of the  Cambridge Companion  series, which solicits essays from leading scholars on major topics and themes in the thinker's work.
• An influential--but contested--reading of Hume that argues Hume maintains the existence of real causal forces.
• A classic work that examines and critiques the ideas and arguments of the  Treatise . 
• Argues, against the prevailing view, that the  Enquiry  is not simply a watered-down version of the  Treatise , and that the former introduces a more reflective perspective on moral judgment that is missing from the  Treatise.

The "Glasgow Edition" of  TMS , edited by Raphael and Macfie, is part of the longer  Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith , and is the standard edition. More recently, the edition edited by Haakonssen is worth consulting as it is more beginner-friendly, offerring more extensive notes on context, references, etc.

• PhilPapers - Adam Smith Category Page ​
• A collection of articles from prominent Smith scholars on a wide variety of topics.
• Stresses the connection between science and Smith's moral philosophy.
• A classic work that focuses more on Smith than Hume. Examines the function of jurisprudence and justice in Smith's thought.
• An influential work that argued for the benefits of vice and the downsides of benevolence. Smith's  TMS  is both a response to and critique of this work.
• There are multiple free, downloadable versions of the book available online.
• Examines Smith's moral philosophy with particular sensitivity for its historical context. Along the way, examines major topics in Smith scholarship, including the "Adam Smith Problem," sympathy, virtues, and self-command.
• One of the key works examining "The Adam Smith Problem," i.e. how the economics and self-interest of  Wealth of Nations  relate to the moral philosophy and sympathy of  TMS .
• A solid overview of Smith's moral philosophy, with emphasis on his conceptions of conscience and sympathy in particular.
• A collection of papers that argue for the systematic coherence of Smith's works.

The Bergin and Fisch translation is the standard edition of Vico's  New Science . An online scanned version is available from the Internet Archive .

The critical edition of the Italian is found in Vico's  Opera.  Note that Vico wrote the original  La Scienca Nuova in 1725 and published a revised version in 1730. A third version was release posthumously in 1744, edited by Fausto Nicolini. The Bergin and Fisch  New Science is a translation of the 1744 work.

Vico, Giambattista.  ​ Opere . Edited by Fausto Nicolini, 8 vols.Laterza, 1911-1941.

The Vico Portal hosts links to various facsimiles of the  New Science .

There are other editions of Vico's works in Italian that may also be worth consulting, including the following:

Vico, Giambattista.  La Scienza nuova 1744 . Edited by Paolo Cristofolini. 2015.

Part of a newer critical edition of Vico's  Opere . 

Available online here .

• PhilPapers - Giovanni Battista Vico Category Page ​
• Hosted at Emory under Professor Emeritus Donald Verene, the IVS contains a biography, list of primary and secondary literature, and online resources for the study of Vico.
• A collection of resources related to the study of Vico and his works, including a list of works, bibliography, and online articles.
• Institute for Vico Studies - "Classic Works"
• A bibliography of works by and on Vico in English from 1884-1994. The bibliography is updated and expanded annually in the journal  New Vico Studies .
• More focused on the history and biography of Vico, but a solid introduction to the development of his thought.
• Argues that Vico inaugurates a new era of philosophy, one both anti-Cartesian and anti-monolithic that is fundamentally historicist and pluralist.
• Ushered in the modern era of Vico scholarship and helped revive interest in the thinker in the 20th century. Argues (somewhat controversially), amongst other things, that Vico's concept of providence is comparable to Hegel's analysis of the cunning of reason.
• Argues that Vico, following Aristotle, thought about the proximity of logic and rhetoric/poetics, rather than the prevailing framework during the Modern period, i.e. the pairing of logic and metaphysics.
• Surveys the whole of Vico's thought in a detailed historical account, ultimately situating Vico's thought relative to the theological and biblical doctrines of his time. Responds, in many ways, to Berlin's views of Vico, especially to Berlin's claim that Vico was a thinker of pluralism.
• A classic examination of Vico and his major work. Examines the underlying principles and arguments of Vico's work that structure the project.
• A thorough overview to the  New Science  containing in-depth analyses of individual sections.
• An influential study of the role of imagination in Vico's  New Science  that argues for the ontological and epistemological priority of imagination in Vico's thought.
• A collection of supplemental essays, notes, and commentaries on the  New Science  that provide background and context to the work.

The standard English translations of Rousseau's works are found in the  Collected Works , edited by Kelly and Masters.

The critical edition of Rousseau's works in French is the  Oeuvres complètes,  above, edited by Gagnebin, Osmont, and Raymond. Both the  Social Contract  and the  Discourse on the Origin of Inequality  (aka the  Second Discourse ) are in volume 3.

• PhilPapers - Jean-Jacques Rousseau Category Page ​
• (In French) Contains links to resources relating to Rousseau, including works and articles about Rousseau.
• (In French) Thorough collection of documents by or related to Rousseau.
• Responds to critiques that Rousseau's philosophy is inconsistent, and argues for his place within the history of ethical theory.
• Vol. 1 of a three-part work covering the entirety of Rousseau's life and work.
• Examines the core ideas of Rousseau's thought as appearing in his major works.
• A short classic work that offers an overview of Rousseau's thought.
• An influential article that argues against common misreadings of Rousseau's "State of Nature".
• A landmark study that surveys the core political ideas of Rousseau in the context of his other works.
• An important scholarly work that argues for the systematic unity of Rousseau's thought, focusing on the "natural goodness of man" as a unifying principle.
• An overview of Rousseau's thought and work that liberally references many secondary sources.
• An influential study of Rousseau's political thought in light of his biography. Argues that, hypocritically, Rousseau advocated openness and transparency when it came to others while simultaneously preserving a space of privacy which allowed Rousseau to withdraw into himself.
• A brief but helpful work written by a prominent Rousseau scholar.

The three Kant texts specified by the Graduate Student Handbook are the  Critique of Pure Reason ,  Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals , and  Critique of [the Power of]   Judgment . In English, the standard translations are all part of the Cambridge Editions of the Works of Immanuel Kant  series. The  Groundwork  is included in the  Practical Philosophy  volume, and is also available in a standalone volume (above).

Kant's  Gesammelte Schriften , often referred to as the "Akademie" edition, contains most of Kant's works including the portfolio texts. It is generally considered the standard edition of Kant's works. It should be noted, however, that there are some more modern editions of select texts. These include the following:

Kant, Immanuel. Werke in Sechs Bänden . Edited by Wilhelm Weischedel, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956.

​ A slightly more modern series than the Akademie editions, but only contains Kant's published works. Also includes the original German translations of Kant's Latin works.

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft . Edited by Ingeborg Heidemann, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013.

Arguably the best modern version of the  Critique of Pure Reason .

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft . Edited by Heiner F. Klemme and Pietro Giordanetti, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001.

Includes the first introduction of the  Critique of Judgment , Akademie edition pagination, and a bibliography. 

• Kant's Moral Philosophy Entry
• Kant's Social and Political Philosophy Entry
• Kant's Transcendental Idealism Entry
• Kant's Transcendental Arguments Entry
• Kant's Account of Reason Entry
• Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self Entry
• Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology Entry
• Kantian Ethics Entry
• Kant: Metaphysics Entry
• Kant: Philosophy of Mind Entry
• Kant: Aesthetics Entry
• PhilPapers - Immanuel Kant Category Page ​
• Contains a number of Kant's texts in both English and German available for free online.
• Assembled by Rudolf Eisler in 1930. Has (German) entries for a large amount of terms in Kant's works.
• Contains links to electronic editions of Kant's  Gesammelte Werke  and various resources related to Kant, including a text search and index of persons.
• A broad site concerning Kant scholarship in a variety of forms and media. Includes a searchable list of over 20K articles on Kant, links to other resources, and a list of upcoming Kant-related conferences and events.
• A compilation of resources related to Kant's writings, focusing especially on his lecture materials. In addition to highly specialized information like student notes, dates and topics of lectures, and information on the educational milieu of the time, the site also has more general resources like a bibliography , a breakdown of the critical (Academy) editions of Kant's works , and a glossary .
• Oxford Bibliographies Page - Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy
• Oxford Bibliographies Page - Immanuel Kant: Ethics
• Oxford Bibliographies Page - Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics and Teleology
• Compiled by Jörg Schroth and still regularly updated. Over 100-page PDF on secondary literature on Kant's ethics; includes abstracts of the works listed.

[Note: as one might expect, the amount of secondary literature on Kant is immense. The following selection focuses mainly on major scholars/works that have attempted to give a general picture of Kant's work]

• An influential reading of Kant's moral theory, attempting to unite the major ideas that appear in Kant's works on morality.
• An influential reading of Kant that interprets Kant's transcendental idealism through the lens of Allison's "epistemic condition".
• A classic of Kant scholarship that influenced readings of the first  Critique  for decades. Emphasizes analyzing the transcendental arguments over and against the metaphysics and transcendental idealism of the work.
• A classic overview of Kant's aesthetics.
• Helped revive the often-maligned or neglected topic of the sublime in the third  Critique , in part by arguing for its moral import.
• A collection of articles both meant as an introduction to Kant's thought and as contributions to Kant scholarship.
• An overview of Kant's entire project from a prominent Kant scholar.
• Examines five major topics in the first  Critique . Guyer argues Kant's transcendental idealism cannot be supported by argument, but that it nevertheless has an important role in Kant's conception of experience.
• Argues for the centrality of judgment in the first  Critique , thus connecting the first and third critiques in an integral way.
• An influential reading of Kant that argues for the importance of the imagination in hermeneutical interpretation.
• Examines a number of major ideas in Kantian ethics, but focuses especially on the issue of universal law.
• Originally published in 1947. Focuses on the categorical imperative in particular, but also considers topics like duty, good will, freedom, and more. Takes the  Groundwork  as its main text.
• A seminal work in Kant scholarship that both spurred and shaped many subsequent generations of Kant scholars.
• An extremely detailed passage-by-passage commentary on the  Metaphysics .
• An interpretation in the tradition of trying to make sense of why the third critique includes an analysis of both aesthetics and teleology.

The standard English translation of  The Answer  is by Arenal and Powell. Their volume contains the translation along with a selection of Sor Juana's poems.

The standard editions of Sor Juana's works are published in her complete works,  Obras Completas .

Online Resources: ​

• Hosted at Dartmouth University, the project contains a variety of resources related to the study of Sor Juana.
• Hosts a free online version of the Spanish  La Repuesta  as well as two other pieces from Sor Juana.
• Includes editions of Sor Juana's works and books and articles published on her (1995-1997)

[Note: perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the literature on Sor Juana is written in Spanish; comparatively little exists in English.]

• Part of a larger collection covering the history of women philosophers. Beggs focuses on Sor Juana's deployment of the concept of philosophy in her case for women's rights.
• A collection of essays meant to introduce the reader to the variety of themes and issues in Sor Juana's works.
• Collection of essays covering Sor Juana's historical context and her historical reception. Focuses more on her poetic works.
• Examines Sor Juana's strategies for accessing sources of knowledge despite the restrictions imposed on women in colonial Mexico.
• Examines the role of the personal anecdotes present in Sor Juana's Respuesta .
• A collection of essays focused on Sor Juana's proto-Feminist ideas.
• Contains a collection of essays on a wide variety of aspects related to Sor Juana, including her life, her poetry, and her prose.
• A collection of articles in a special issue of Colonial Latin American Review . Many of these essays were groundbreaking in subsequent research on Sor Juana.
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22 Modernism and Philosophy

Peter Osborne, Kingston University

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article examines the relation between philosophy and modernism. It explains that although modernism is a philosophical concept, it has rarely been treated as such. Philosophers have generally contented themselves with applications of modernism to the disciplinary field of philosophy of conventional usages forged elsewhere instead of digging down through the mantle of its multifarious instances to its conceptual core and working back up to philosophical interpretation of its varieties. The article argues that the transdisciplinarity of a post-Marxian philosophical modernism which affirms the temporal logic of the new through the openness of philosophical discourse to the present as a whole is a model in itself.

New or not new: that's the question which is asked of a work from both the highest and the lowest points of view. From the point of view of history, and of curiosity. (Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Athenaeum Fragment’ 45)

Modernism is a philosophical concept, but it has rarely been treated as such. Instead of digging down through the mantle of its multifarious instances to its conceptual core, and working back up to philosophical interpretations of its varieties, philosophers have generally contented themselves with applications to the disciplinary field of philosophy of conventional usages forged elsewhere. Thus, among the best recent philosophical accounts of modernism in English, we find one that extends the concept to philosophy by analogy with its use in art criticism, 1 one that restricts it to the philosophical aspect of modernist art, 2 and a third that, despite its title, neglects to analyse the concept directly at all, treating it as effectively synonymous with ‘modernity’. 3 The conjunction of ‘modernism’ with ‘philosophy’ thus demands not so much the critical summation of a literature as, firstly, the construction of modernism as a philosophical concept. Only then can the question of its significance for the philosophical field itself be intelligibly pursued. Such a construction is best grounded, not in philosophers' occasional and inconsistent uses of the term, but in the conceptual aspects of its broader semantic history. 4

Modernism as a Philosophical Concept 1: Historical Semantics

Two things should be borne in mind at the outset. Firstly, the core meaning of modernism derives from its place, as an ‘ism’, within the historically evolving set of terms of which ‘modern’, ‘modernity’, and ‘modernization’ are the main related elements. Secondly, these are all, foremost, temporal concepts, which, over the last two hundred years, have come to acquire their deepest meanings as categories within the philosophy of history . 5

The English ‘modern’, meaning most simply ‘of today’ and by extension ‘recent’, may appear philosophically innocent. However, within the Western tradition, since at least the late fifth century, this ‘today’ of the modern ( modernus ) has carried with it a set of conceptual connotations acquired from its place within a present‐centred, phenomenological temporality of present–past–future (today–yesterday–tomorrow) overlaid upon a linear, Christian form of historical time. Augustine's conception of the ‘time of the soul’ as a threefold present is the explicit philosophical anticipation of this conjunction. 6 Within such a linear consciousness of time (which supplanted the previously prevailing cyclical temporality), the present acquired the connotation of an irreversible break with the past. The ‘today’ of the modern thus henceforth marked a sense of the present as new ( novus ). More specifically, it came to be used to pick out from within the present those things that are most markedly different from the past in such a way as to generate expectations about the future, making them, by the end of the eighteenth century, constitutive of the historical meaning and value of the present, or what we would now call ‘the historical present’.

As such, the modern denotes a temporal structure of negation (negation of the past within the present by the new), which, in splitting the present from within (into the ‘old’ and the ‘new’), makes ‘modern’ an inherently subjective, value‐laden, and critical term. ‘Modern’ has no fixed, objective referent, ‘only a subject, of which it is full’. 7 This subject of the utterance of the modern enacts a ‘critique of the present’ in its broad, threefold sense. Furthermore, in the modern, the new within the present does not merely demand more attention and value than what is not new; increasingly, it came to negate the latter's claim to be part of the ‘living’ present itself. Here, temporal negation is an antiquation, a making old (hence ‘past’ and no longer ‘living’) of the not‐new within the present, through an act of disjunction or dissociation. This is the subjective conceptual basis of modernization theory. ‘Modern’ is thus an agonistic, conflict‐generating term, as is evident in the opposition between the Ancients and the Moderns through which it first acquired an epochal, periodizing significance in twelfth‐century Europe. It was not until much later, however, during the eighteenth century, that intensifying social and psychic investments in the temporality of the modern as the new gave rise to the concept of modernity—connoting a break not merely with the old, but with the temporality of tradition itself (in which the new appears, but only weakly, as an aspect of the differential repetition of the old). This was registered, paradigmatically, in the German coinage Neuzeit (literally, new time): the self‐transcending temporality of an investment in the new that opposes itself to tradition in general. 8 This is a consciousness of time that is simultaneously and paradoxically constitutive of history as development and de ‐historicizing, in its absolutization of the present as the time of the production of the new.

The English ‘modernism’—denoting a collective belief in and sympathy for the modern or the new—pre‐dates the intensified sense of the present as modern associated with the concept of modernity, 9 but both its generalized form and its growing importance from the latter part of the nineteenth century rest upon it. Indeed, in its full, generalized sense, the concept of modernism first appears in Baudelaire's work in his affirmative attitude towards the phenomenological sense of modernité as a quality of experience that he was himself the first to articulate. The late eighteenth‐century Neuzeit (a new time for a new world) and Baudelaire's mid‐nineteenth‐century coinage of modernité (the ‘main characteristics’ of which are ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’ 10 ) are the two main semantic streams that fed the growing—indeed irresistible—power of the concept of modernity in the nineteenth century. The concept of modernism condenses , intensifies , and, most crucially, affirms this dual historical and phenomenological ‘modernity’. In its most general conceptual meaning, modernism is a collective affirmation of the modern as such . This is not merely an affirmation of ‘modern ways’, at some particular time (which was the sense in which Luther used the Latin term modernista , for example), but an affirmation of the temporality of the modern: an affirmation of a specific temporal negation, the time‐determination of the new . 11

In Baudelaire's famous usage, modernité denotes not merely the quality of being modern or new, but the essential transitoriness that this quality had by then acquired, as a result of its intensification and generalization as a lived experience of time; and hence its aesthetic purity as a feeling of time . This form of experience had as its condition not just an extraordinary acceleration in the rhythms of social change—urbanization, industrialization, revolution—but their condensation and formalization in the metropolitan cultural logic of fashion. Indeed, it has been the increasing importance of fashion to capitalist production—in stimulating both innovation and consumption—that has subsequently led to the identification of modernity as capitalism's paradigmatic cultural form. 12 It is the commonality of these structures of experience across capitalist societies, which are otherwise culturally heterogeneous, that makes their affirmation—modernism—so powerful a medium of cultural translation and exchange. 13 Baudelaire's use of the term modernité registers not merely the intensification of the experience of change but, equally importantly, his sense of the need to conquer it, to appropriate it subjectively, firstly, by submitting oneself to it (and hence, paradoxically finding a form of ‘non‐selfhood’, non‐moi ) and, secondly, by representing it in its presentness in art. 14 In its affirmation of the transitoriness of novelty ( la nouveauté ) as a value, Baudelaire's ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ is the first articulation of a general—that is, a proto‐philosophical—concept of modernism.

This proto‐philosophical concept of modernism derives its universality from its condensation of the generalization of ‘correspondences’ between particular types of metropolitan experience of modernity: paradigmatically, the crowd and the commodity (in the Universal Expositions and the Salons, in particular), gambling, prostitution, fashion, the machine. Its subject, ‘the lover of universal life’, is ‘an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non‐I”’ ( un moi insatiable de non‐moi ). This is an ‘I’ that absolutizes the present in its passing, rather than merely experiencing it (in the sense of Erlebnis , living through it) as a historical condition. As such, it exhibits a quasi‐Nietzschean character, as an affirmer of the present. It is from its transcendental character with respect to each particular instance of the new, however, that its most distinctively philosophical meanings, dynamics, and difficulties arise. For such an affirmation of novelty in its transitoriness is the same across the totality of manifestations of the new. As a structure, ‘the new’ is the ‘ever‐selfsame’; it represses the very duration it affirms. 15 As a philosophical concept, modernism thus poses the problem of nihilism within the very heart of the creative act.

Modernism as a Philosophical Concept 2: Transcendental Operation and Historical Multiplicity

As the affirmation of the time‐determination of the new, modernism gains meaning in any particular cultural field or domain of experience from the application of a performative logic of temporal negation to the field in question. In so doing, it makes a claim for the production of the qualitatively new within that field. More precisely, it makes a claim for the production of something constitutive of the qualitative novelty of the historical present itself (this is its difference from ‘mere’ fashion). This claim carries with it certain expectations about the future. These expectations differ from the more determinate orientation towards the future of the avant‐gardes. As the modern intensified, it increasingly incorporated the future's prospective negation of the present into its sense of the present itself, as transitoriness. Here, the future is projected as an abstract negation of the present (the present of the negation of the past), irrespective of any particular historical content, in a pure temporal formalism. This formalism is a crucial difference from the avant‐gardes, which always act in the name of particular, determinate futures. Avant‐gardes ‘fail’, but in its transcendental determination, modernism (thus far) simply moves on.

Something may thus be said to be ‘modernist’ here in two distinct senses, corresponding to that mobile ‘empirico‐transcendental doublet’ that characterizes not only Kant's thought of the human, but all thought of the historical a priori as well. 16 On the one hand, something may be described as ‘modernist’ in the quasi‐transcendental sense of gaining its intelligibility from its affirmation, within a particular cultural field, of the performative temporal logic of negation that constitutes the structure of modernism in general (the performance of the negation affirms the structure of production of the new, and not merely its particular result). This is modernism as a transcendental structure of temporalization , an operation or a generative logic . On the other hand, something may be called ‘modernist’ in the more historically specific sense of having been the modernism of its day: that is, constituted as a particular form of negation of a particular historically received cultural field. In the first case, modernism is a meta‐critical term; in the second, it is a term of an empirical historical criticism. There is thus both a ‘general economy’ of modernism and a plurality of ‘restricted economies’ or modernism s —an overlapping historically successive multiplicity of modernisms within and across particular cultural fields.

The critical difficulty we inherit from this conceptual doubling lies in the prevalence of the fixing of the term ‘modernism’ to particular occurrences of the latter sense, as a name for particular hegemonic modernisms. For the reduction of ‘modernism’ to an empirical historical concept effaces its more fundamental transcendental operation as an ongoing affirmation of a structure of temporal negation, in the ongoing production of a competing multiplicity of modernisms. This dual logic of modernism (transcendental and empirical), and the hegemony of particular reified modernisms that it produces, can be seen at work in the philosophical field itself, as elsewhere.

It is characteristic of the philosophical field that the term ‘modernism’ was self‐consciously embraced only belatedly (in the 1960s), and then retrospectively applied, although the adjective ‘modern’ (German neu— more literally, ‘new’, as in neuen Philosophie , modern philosophy) had been used as a periodizing term in the history of philosophy since its beginnings, and its mid‐nineteenth‐century substantive form (‘the modern’) was quickly picked up by philosophers. Indeed—readers beware!—in translations of German philosophical texts, such as Adorno's, it is this term, der Moderne , rather than Modernismus , which is usually being translated by the English ‘modernism’. ( Modernismus is a more pejorative usage.) A similar point applies to some uses of the English ‘modernity’ (in the translation of the title of Habermas's influential twelve lectures on the topic, for example); and even on occasion ‘avant‐garde’. 17 In order to reconstruct a history of modernist philosophies, however, it is the affirmation of the structure of temporal negation, within the philosophical field—and the constitution of historico‐philosophical meaning through such affirmations—to which we need attend, rather than the presence of the term ‘modernism’ itself. Such an optic directs us, in the first instance, to the main staging posts in the 150‐year history of German philosophy from Kant to the early Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. For, as Pippin acknowledges, modernity (let alone modernism as the affirmation of its intensified temporal form) ‘is not a philosophical or, really, any other sort of “problem” within [the British and American] philosophical traditions’. 18 It became an issue within French philosophy in the twentieth century, largely as a result of the convergence of the legacy of Baudelaire with the reception of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Our story begins with Kant, not because he is ‘the first thoroughgoing philosophical modernist’, but because it has been claimed that he is. 19 Understanding why, and why the claim does not survive scrutiny, is instructive in a number of respects. Not least because the claim has as one confusing consequence that anti‐Kantian philosophers (such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, in particular) appear as fundamentally opposed to philosophical modernism, rather than, as they are, paradigms of its affirmative structure and symptoms of its profound paradoxes and problems. The claim derives from a dual conflation: firstly, of the notion of philosophical modernism with the philosophical discourse of modernity; and secondly, of the philosophical discourse of modernity with a certain understanding of the Enlightenment. Philosophical modernism is thereby reduced to a series of variants of Kant's version of the Enlightenment project.

The ground of the claim that Kant is a philosophical modernist lies in the historical self‐consciousness of the German Enlightenment as the intellectual representative of a new beginning, for which the radicalization of the critique of the authority of tradition dictated that modernity ‘create its normativity out of itself’. Habermas, who has done most to elaborate this concept of modernity, initially claimed it was Hegel who was ‘the first to raise [this] to the level of a philosophical problem’. However, in his lecture on Kant's ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ Foucault argued that the problem was explicitly present in Kant, and Habermas subsequently conceded the point. Pippin follows this consensus, extending the claim into a reading of Kant's philosophy as a whole. 20 In Pippin's version, the self‐transcending temporal structure of modernity finds its philosophical basis and legitimization in the self‐determining character of autonomous reason in Kant's philosophy (and German idealism more generally). The problem here does not lie in the identification of Kant as a philosopher of modernity, in the specific sense of Neuzeit identified by Koselleck; even in Foucault's extended, retrospective construction of Kant as a practitioner of the critical ontology of the present, and hence also of ourselves—although this surpasses Kant's self‐understanding by some distance. 21 Rather, the problem lies in understanding Kant's account of rational self‐determination as a modern ism on the basis of the ‘ruptural’ character of the structure of self‐grounding alone.

Kant was not the first philosopher to have conceived of his thought as a self‐grounding new beginning. That role has traditionally been assigned to Descartes. It is the basis for the conventional identification of Descartes's thought as the first truly ‘modern’ philosophy. This epistemological self‐grounding (via the method of doubt) has no consequence for practical philosophy in Descartes, and remains the activity of a metaphysically conceived substance (soul)—this explains the import of the word ‘thoroughgoing’ in Pippin's claim for Kant. However, these aspects are separate from the claim for the identification of ‘modernism’ with the temporal structure of the self‐grounding break with the authority of tradition. Such a break is undoubtedly ‘modern’, in its declaration of a new historical beginning (and radically so, in its self‐grounding), but it is far from being specifically modern ist , in the sense of affirming the temporality of the new, in either Descartes or Kant. Indeed, like most modern philosophers, both Descartes and Kant conceived their philosophies as new beginnings that were also decisively philosophically self‐completing. No ongoing production of philosophical novelty was envisaged. However unending Kant may have envisaged the process of Enlightenment to be, in its successive approximation of human conduct to rational principles, it was nonetheless based on essentially timeless rational universals. This is the philosophically completed modernity of the Enlightenment's practically ‘incomplete’ project. The subject of Kantian Enlightenment may need to break with tradition—indeed with the heteronomous determinations of all social norms—again and again, with each act; but not so as to produce the new; rather, to give actuality to a universal reason; to conform to reason. As Foucault pointed out, this is the ‘piety’ and ‘most touching of treasons’ of ‘those who wish us to preserve alive and intact the heritage of Aufklärung ’: they fail to subject the event to reflection on its own historical limits. 22 They fail to acknowledge the fundamental iterability of modernity as such. They fail to see that the logic of self‐transcendence dictates that it too transcend its own inaugural forms. This is its paradoxical core as a cultural form, enacted in, but comically misrecognized by, the (swiftly passing) concept of the postmodern. And it is precisely the consciousness of this iterability—and its affirmation—that constitutes modernism as a transcendental operation or philosophical form. 23

In fact, it is the self‐limiting, rule‐governed character of Kantian reason that Pippin values—its projection of freedom as self‐limitation—rather than the proto‐Baudelairean aspects of the Kantian subject. In Kant's ‘thoroughgoing’ version of philosophical self‐grounding, the spontaneity of the subject (spontaneity of apperception, spontaneity of imagination, spontaneity of the understanding, and spontaneity of ‘the subject as a thing‐in‐itself’, or ‘absolute spontaneity of freedom’ 24 ) is, crucially, not merely self‐determining (and hence self‐transcending) but rationally self‐limiting. Here, spontaneity is the medium of self‐limitation, rather than willed self‐dissolution into the multitude. In Kant, the meaning of an action derives from the rationality of its determination (its claim to universality), not from the temporal relations between a present affirmed as the production of the new, a negated past and a projected future. There is no modern ism there. The best one might say of Kant in this regard, following Foucault, is that the question of the philosophical meaning of the present is raised by the historical writings—a question to which philosophical modernism offers a series of alternative answers.

None of the discourses of the modern, modernity, and modernism in philosophy are tied to ‘reason’ at a conceptual level, although the first two (modern and modernity) are historically associated with it. Contra Habermas and Pippin, the association of philosophical modernity with the Kantian form of rationally self‐limiting spontaneity was thus historically passing, in a deep sense, in much the same way that the association between artistic modernism and aestheticism was the historical starting point for a series of (at times explicitly anti ‐aesthetic) artistic modernisms. 25 However, if the modern, modernity, and modernism in philosophy are not necessarily tied to ‘reason’, they are tied, structurally, to the philosophical concept of the subject (and its predecessors and successors) by virtue of their basis in the phenomenological temporality of the threefold present. The primary determination of the philosophy of the subject lies not in its relations to ‘consciousness’ and ‘reason’ but in its relations to time—ultimately, this is true even of Kant himself. 26 It was through the mediation of the concept of the subject that the problematic relationship between reason and modernity as a form of historical time was played out in early nineteenth‐century philosophy—paradigmatically, in Hegel, in the self‐positing and reflective self‐appropriation of spirit ( Geist ), that (rational) substance that is ‘equally’ subject. 27 For the subject of modernity is a collective one. As Ricœur has put it: the ‘full and precise formulation’ of the concept of modernity is achieved only ‘when one says and writes “our” modernity’. 28 And one can say and write ‘our’ modernity philosophically only by positing ‘I that is We and We that is I’ 29 as its speculative subject. ‘Modernity’ becomes a fully formed philosophical concept at the point at which it comes to denote the experience of this subject: ‘history’ in the collective singular. However, it becomes the central category of the philosophy of history—transformed into a philosophy of historical time—only after the critique of Hegel's absolute (in which time is ultimately abolished), 30 via the extraction of the formal structure of temporal negation from the totalizing narrative of necessary development in Hegel's philosophy of history. Modernism is the affirmation of this formal temporal structure, the new. As such, the philosophical concept of modernism finds certain of its problems foreshadowed both in Hegel's philosophy and in the philosophical romanticism to which it was a response. These concern, principally, the concept of negation and its relationship to affirmation.

Negation, Affirmation, the New

The central philosophical issue at stake in modernism is: how does the affirmation of the new stand in relation to its negation of the old? The two main traditions of philosophical modernism—the Hegelian and the Nietzschean—are defined by their differences on this issue. Broadly speaking, in the first instance, these are the differences between an understanding of temporal negation as dialectical negation, in which what is affirmed is affirmed through negation (Hegel), and a conception of temporal negation as itself a mode of being of affirmation (Nietzsche). More specifically, in the first case, the structure of the temporal negation constitutive of ‘the affirmation of the new’ is the result of the subtraction of the form of dialectical development from the systematic context that makes such development a progressive definition of the absolute, and hence ultimately a supersession ( Aufhebung ) of finitude itself. Nonetheless, it avoids the neo‐Kantian regression of dialectic to a general method, by repositioning this dialectical temporal formalism, historically and ontologically, as the structure of experience of a specific subject: the subject of metropolitan modernity. On its Hegelian coding, this subject displays the immanent (self‐)transcendence characteristic of dialectical development in general, in which affirmation is the ultimate meaning of negation itself: ‘The highest form of nothing for itself would be freedom, but this is negativity, insofar as it deepens itself to its highest intensity and is itself affirmation—indeed absolute affirmation.’ 31

From this perspective, the modernist affirmation of the new may be understood as an enactment of the affirmative essence of negativity itself. This ‘deepening of negativity to its highest intensity’ takes the logical form of a double negation (negation of negation): the new as the not‐old (first negation) must itself be negated in its being‐for the old (second negation), in order to be understood as something for‐itself. Yet the first negation (its being‐for the old as its other) is nonetheless ‘preserved’ within this process of supersession, such that the determinacy or meaning of the new continues to derive from its negation of the old, within its independent positivity. (Hegel is fond of misquoting Spinoza: omnis determinatio est negativo , all determination is negation. 32 ) In so far as the new necessarily involves this double negation, its modernist affirmation affirms both negations together: that is, both its determinate negativity and the negation of its being‐for‐another that registers its positivity as an independent thing. Furthermore, this for‐itself‐ness of the new is the prospective starting point for subsequent negations, and hence transitory. The intensification of the experience of novelty depends upon this anticipation of its ‘death’. This is the Hegelian meaning of Baudelairean modernism, for which both intelligibility and affirmation derive from negativity. It has the form of what Hegel called a ‘spurious or negative’ infinity: ‘Something becomes an other, but the other is itself a something, so it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum .’ 33

From Hegel's own point of view this is a profound defect (one might even call it nihilism), since for him ‘the genuine ( wahrhafte ) infinite’ was ‘the basic concept of philosophy’. 34 From the point of view of the critique of Hegel's absolute, however, such an endless series marks both the openness of the future and the ultimately allegorical character of the philosophical meaning of the new. This can be discerned in Hegel's own account of Romantic art, on which the modern principle of subjectivity (subjective freedom) dictates that sensuous representation ‘be posited as negative, absorbed and reflected into spiritual unity’. The ‘sensuous externality of concrete form’ of the ‘vehicle of expression’ of such art thus appears (in Bosanquet's appropriately Baudelairean 1886 translation of the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of Fine Art ) ‘as something transient and fugitive ( unwesentliche , vorübergehende )…committed to contingency ( Zufälligkeit )’. 35 Baudelairean modernism is the consummation of what appears here as the Romantic commitment to a philosophically subjectively interpreted contingency. However, the modernist extraction of the temporal form of dialectical negation from the context of Hegel's system profoundly problematizes its relationship to history. On the one hand, history becomes the history of the new, the comprehension of which becomes a condition of further novelty, further negations—since only if the present is properly understood in its novelty can that novelty itself be made an object of meaningful negation. Historical consciousness is thus increasingly important; and modernism is itself a form of historical consciousness. On the other hand, however, the production of the qualitatively historically new requires a rupture with the historically comprehended present for which there appears to be no basis or rationale, once the standpoint of the absolute has been forsaken as the ground of the dialectic. In the absence of a systematic determination of development, the question arises as to the source and meaning of the new. The future becomes a void, and into this void flow ‘philosophies of the future’. 36 The problem is registered in Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1874), and then purportedly overcome in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5) and his 1883–8 notebooks, published as The Will to Power . 37 Nietzsche thereby inaugurated a second, anti‐Hegelian, anti‐historical stream of philosophical modernism.

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ was a challenge to the increasingly historical culture of modernity, on behalf of modernity itself, which there takes the name ‘life’. 38 Life is not a biological category for Nietzsche, but the name of whatever is able to forget and thereby to act . It is, however, understood as ‘an unhistorical power’. Baudelaire's experience of the beauty of the feeling of time is transformed here into the experience of the power of life. There is a philosophical basis for this move in Kant; not the Kant of rational self‐determination, however, but the Kant of the Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment (1790), in which ‘an entirely special faculty for discriminating and judging that contributes nothing to cognition’ is grounded upon the subject's ‘feeling of life’ ( Lebensgefühl ), ‘under the name of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure’. 39 Indeed, Kant maintained: ‘it cannot be denied that all representations in us, whether they are objectively merely sensible or else entirely intellectual…affect the feeling of life, and none of them, insofar as it is a modification of the subject, can be indifferent…because the mind for itself is entirely life (the principle of life itself)’. 40

There is a textual prompt in Nietzsche's opening quotation from Goethe on ‘quickening activity’—quickening, or animation ( Belebung ), being the word Kant famously used to describe ‘the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgement of taste’. 41 Nietzsche's philosophical modernism is thus ‘aesthetic’ in a manner that the dialectical tradition is not; and in a way associated at that time with the work of art: ‘only if history can endure to be transformed into a work of art will it perhaps be able to preserve instincts or even evoke them’. 42

Ultimately, however, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ itself remains an aporetic dialectical text, committed to the position that ‘ the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture ’. For the critical historian does not so much forget as decide against the historical culture of the present, in the name of a power of action invested in a purer present. In severing oneself from the past absolutely, one would sever oneself from the present as well, and hence also from its critique. ‘[The] same life that requires forgetting demands a temporary forgetting of this forgetfulness; it wants to be clear as to how unjust the existence of anything…is, and how greatly this thing deserves to perish. Then its past is regarded critically, then one takes the knife to its roots, then one cruelly tramples over every kind of piety.’ 43 The association of the future with critical negation thus remains here, in part. Indeed, perhaps the greatest of Nietzsche's legacies to the modernist tradition has been the contribution of his concept of genealogy to its sense of history: ‘ If you are to venture to interpret the past you can do so only out of the fullest exertion of the vigour the present …’. 44 This principle, exemplified in his own ‘polemic’ On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), is fundamental to the modernist historiographies of both Benjamin and Foucault. 45 Genealogy is modernist historiography.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra , however, the temporalizing self‐reflection that succeeded Hegel's logicist ‘absolute reflection’ of history, and which makes up only one side of the aporia of the second of the Untimely Meditations , is itself absolutized. As if in response to Rimbaud's 1873 imperative ‘to be absolutely modern’, 46 with the idea of transvaluation or the transmutation of values, Nietzsche absolutizes affirmation: ‘life’ is philosophically transformed into ‘will to power’, the ‘ inner will’ of force. 47 In the process, the dialectical account of the relation of the affirmation of the new to the negation of the old is inverted. If everything is affirmation, the difference between negation and affirmation must be internal to affirmation itself, as the difference between a ‘reactive’ and nihilistic affirmation of negation (dialectics) and an ‘active’ affirmation of affirmation itself (transvaluation). Such an active, ‘secondary’ affirmation, it is claimed, converts negation itself into an affirmative power. On Deleuze's account:

The negative becomes a power of affirming: it is subordinated to affirmation and passes into the service of an excess of life. Negation is no longer the form under which life conserves all that is reactive in itself, but is, on the contrary, the act by which it sacrifices all its reactive forms. In the man who wants to perish, the man who wants to be overcome, negation changes sense… Only affirmation exists as an independent power; the negative shoots out from it like lightning, but also becomes absorbed into it, disappearing into it like a soluble fire. In the man who wants to perish the negative announces the superhuman, but only affirmation produces what the negative announces. 48

For Nietzsche, to affirm is to ‘make use of excess in order to invent new forms of life’. As a mode of being of affirmation, the negative no longer gives meaning to the new (as a conceptually constitutive logical negation), but partakes in its creation through ‘the warlike play of differences’ and ‘the joy of destruction’. This is Nietzsche's great ‘anti‐dialectical discovery’: ‘negativity as negativity of the positive’. 49 Its modernism lies in its radical transformation of the philosophical meaning of ‘affirmation’ in the affirmation of the time‐determination of the new. With Nietzsche, modernism is ontologized : history is reduced to a new sense of becoming, the becoming of the new. This truly is a properly philosophical modernism. However, in rejecting negation as the means to giving determinacy to the new, it immediately runs up against the problem of the transcendental structure of the new as the same : the threat of nihilism that lurks within modernism—a negative nihilism of no difference, as opposed to the reactive nihilism of conceptual difference.

Nietzsche's solution is the famously obscure doctrine of eternal return: the imperative that, when you will something, you will to do it an infinite number of times. Such a return is itself ‘the most extreme form of nihilism’, but, in completing (absolutizing?) nihilism, it is understood to break its connection to reactive forces, negating their function of conservation (‘the same’) and converting them into forces of active self‐destruction. To will the eternal return was, for Nietzsche, to become active. In the eternal return, nihilism is ‘vanquished by itself’. 50 The consequence, however, is that while ‘the new’ may no longer be ‘the same’, it is also no longer new. In the eternal return, Nietzsche's modernism consumes itself. At their highest points, Hegel's ‘negativity that is itself absolute affirmation’ and Nietzsche's ‘negativity as a mode of being of affirmation as such’ are thus perhaps less different than Deleuze supposed—not as a result of some ‘compromise’, 51 but as a result of the precise character of their difference.

Both Hegel and Nietzsche, in their very different ways, absolutized the temporality of the modern to the point of the dissolution of historical time, and with it the very notion of qualitative historical novelty upon which modernism depends. Yet the new itself is abstract; ‘it gives no satisfaction’, as Marx put it. It is, rather, the emblem of the promise of a future, a future in which, for Marx, wealth will have become ‘the absolute working out of creative potentialities…the development of all human powers as such [as] the end in itself…Where humanity…Strives not to remain something it has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming.’ 52 There is a Nietzschean aspect to Marx's imagining here, although ‘the absolute movement of becoming’ derives from the restlessness of Hegel's absolute rather than Nietzsche's becoming‐active; and it has determinate historical conditions, in capitalism's ‘constant revolutionizing’ of the instruments of production ‘and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’. 53 In this respect, modernism is a capitalist cultural form, even—perhaps especially—as it points beyond its current conditions of existence.

For Benjamin, Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence was itself a reflection of those conditions, in transforming the historical event into ‘a mass‐produced article’. Benjamin attributed its ‘sudden topicality’ in the 1930s to the accelerated succession of capitalist crises, whereby ‘it was no longer possible, in all circumstances, to expect a recurrence of conditions across any interval of time shorter than that provided by eternity’, leading to ‘the obscure presentiment that henceforth one must rest content with cosmic constellations’. 54 He was interested in the way the idea of eternal recurrence emerged at about the same time, inflected in different directions, in Baudelaire, Blanqui, and Nietzsche. Its equivalent in Benjamin's own time is to be found in Heidegger's concept of repetition. In the wake of Nietzsche, Benjamin and Heidegger were the foremost philosophical modernists of the first part of the twentieth century, in whose writings the philosophical thought of the new was refracted through the prisms of its two main political ideologies, communism and fascism, respectively.

Heidegger and Benjamin

It is symptomatic that as Heidegger struggled with the political implications of his ‘critique of the present’ (the phrase recurs in his manuscripts of the early 1920s), in the late 1930s, in the aftermath of his formal participation in National Socialism, he did so through an extended confrontation with Nietzsche. 55 He sought, in particular, to expose the failure of Nietzsche's concept of will to power to overcome both metaphysics and nihilism in order to highlight his own (in his view successful) overcoming, derived from his rethinking of the relationship between being and time. Heidegger was explicitly opposed to the interpretation of his own work in terms of the modern, and most critics (associating fascism with a backward‐looking historical consciousness) have agreed. However, the structural prioritization of futurity in its conception of existential temporalization, and, indeed, the very notion of originary temporalization, mark Being and Time (1927) as a work of philosophical modernism. The notion of a time‐determination through which I have characterized philosophical modernism (as the affirmation of the time‐determination of the new) is here taken up and integrated into the ‘ecstatic‐horizonal’ structure of ‘originary temporalization’ itself. In this respect, Heidegger follows Nietzsche in ontologizing the time‐consciousness of modernism. The historical self‐consciousness of his philosophy was modernist too in so far as it involved the ongoing negation of a totalized past—‘the history of metaphysics’—to which previous such negations were successively retrospectively consigned. This is a structure to which Heidegger would subsequently subject his own early thought, and to which Derrida would subject Heidegger's philosophy as a whole, thereby establishing a distinctive Germanic–French lineage of philosophical modernism. 56

Heidegger's philosophical modernism is an offshoot of a field in which the concept of modernism was established early on—theology (Pope Pius X condemned ‘de modernistarum doctrinis’ in the encyclical Pascendi gregis of 8 September 1907)—and of Heidegger's ambivalent relationship to it. While he accepted what he described in 1922 as ‘the fundamental atheism of philosophy’, Heidegger nonetheless still conceived his project as ‘an ontological founding of Christian theology as a science’, even after the publication of Being and Time . 57 This explains the peculiar temporal dynamics of his thought. For the ‘critique of the present’ on which he embarked understood the present to be defined by the ‘system’ of Catholicism, with its roots in the medieval reception of Aristotle. Heidegger's ‘destruction’ of that system set out from the standpoint of the philosophical modernity of Husserl's phenomenology; hence his theological modernism. (Indeed, if there is a claim to be made for the modernism of a self‐grounding transcendental subject—on account of its time‐consciousness—it is with regard to Husserl, not Kant. 58 ) However, it proceeded, via a phenomenological recovery of Aristotle's ontology from the Scholastic tradition, which fed back into Heidegger's radicalization of Husserl's critique of neo‐Kantianism, to produce what Kisiel has called a ‘neo‐Hellenic phenomenology of λογος corresponding to the ontological phenomenology of the παϴος of the question of being as such’. 59 Heidegger's (Husserlian) modernity was thus radicalized into a philosophical modernism by the archaic character of his other sources, in a manner structurally analogous to the temporal form of the reactionary modernism of conservative revolution and National Socialism in inter‐war Germany, 60 which derived its energy from the historical distance of its ideal from its present, re‐presenting dead (and thereby idealized and mythologized) tradition as novelty. This is reflected in the internal structure of Heidegger's account of originary temporalization, in particular his concept of ‘resolute repetition’.

In Being and Time , the existential priority of the future is famously secured by the role of the anticipation of death in ‘temporalizing’ a temporality that ‘has the unity of a future which makes itself present in the process of having been’. Being‐towards‐death, as ‘potentiality for being‐a‐whole’, is anticipation of possibility; it is ‘what first makes this possibility possible , and sets it free as possibility’. However, such futurity exists only as the projected horizon of a present defined by the mode of its taking up of a specific past; and for Heidegger himself such taking up is only ‘authentic’ if it takes the form of a ‘resolute repetition’. ‘Authentic’ existence involves ‘appropriating’ the existential structure of time by showing ‘resoluteness’ in the face of death by choosing a ‘fate’ ( Schicksal ). This choice is understood by Heidegger in the restricted form of the repetition of a heritage of possibilities. And it is here that the reactionary character of his philosophical modernism emerges, as this already constitutively backward‐looking heritage of possibilities is identified with the destiny ( Geschick ) of a people ( Volk ). The new is the ‘ resolute repetition’ of the old. The temporal formalism of a future‐orientated philosophical modernism is filled with the content of the past. 61

But why might not the past be taken up via a determinate not‐repeating negation? Heidegger's only response is to declare such a taking‐up inauthentic, even though on his own terms the criterion of authenticity here ought to be its ‘resoluteness’. Those who seek the modern ( das Moderne ), he argues, do so because the past has become ‘unrecognizable’ ( unkenntlich ) to them. 62 In a dialectical modernism, however, it is precisely recognition of the past in its pastness (recognition without identification) that leads to the negation of past and present alike, in a process that corresponds, quite precisely, to what Heidegger called ‘finite transcendence’, albeit one that is not merely temporal, but qualitatively historical. Benjamin's modernist philosophy of history opposes itself directly to Heidegger's reactionary modernism by working the post‐Nietzschean problematic in a different way, in order to emphasize the ‘explosive’ negative power of ‘the now of recognizability’ ( Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit ) itself 63 —a recognizability that has nothing to do with repetition.

Benjamin plays the genealogical perspective of the Nietzsche of the second of the Untimely Meditations against the repetitions of the later Nietzsche and Heidegger alike:

For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only prehistory for the epoch he himself must live. And so, for him, there can be no appearance of repetition in history, since precisely those moments in the course of history which matter most to him, by virtue of their index as ‘fore‐history’, become moments of the present day and change their specific character according to the catastrophic or triumphant nature of the day. 64

Benjamin's historical perspective is that of a radical presentism that derives its futurity not from the general structure of existential temporalization, but from the dialectical power of the image as an historical index:

It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the then to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, leaping forth….the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time….each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability….Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic—images. 65

This famously interruptive flash gives rise to ‘the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand and has come to a standstill’; ‘a conception of the present as now‐time’, which, as the sign of ‘a messianic arrest of happening’ is ‘shot through with splinters of messianic time’—that is, a time external to history, from the standpoint of which history is figured as a whole. 66

This is a philosophical modernism in two main respects. First, such ‘interferences’ in temporal continuity are understood as the means whereby ‘the truly new makes itself felt for the first time’. 67 And it is the job of the materialist historiographer–cultural critic–philosopher of history of the new (the roles converge) to produce such interferences, thereby securing the conditions of effectivity of the ‘truly’ (i.e. qualitatively historically) new. Benjamin is the first to incorporate the temporal paradox of modernity (that it is simultaneously constitutive of history as development and yet de‐historicizing in its absolutization of the present as the time of the new) into his concept of the new. Secondly, the means for doing this are themselves modernist, in the sense of being drawn from the (constructivist) artistic modernism of the day, montage: ‘the art of citing without quotation marks’ taken to ‘the very highest level’ ( zur höchsten Höhe ). 68 This may appear to be modernist merely by analogy with artistic modernism, but there is a deeper sense at work. It is the crossing of genres here—the understanding of the necessity to philosophy of a new sense of presentational form—that is distinctively philosophically modernistic. This is the heritage of early German Romanticism, which, developed prior to Hegel, takes on its full significance only after the critique of Hegel's philosophy. Early German Romanticism—and its philosophical conception of the fragment in particular—is a philosophical modernism après la lettre : it affirms the new, philosophically, as an imperative of philosophical presentation. 69 There is a nachträglich (afterwards) effect here, grasped by Benjamin himself in his concept of afterlife ( Nachleben ): ‘Historical “understanding” is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood.’ 70 Philosophical modernism is part of the afterlife of early German Romanticism.

Modernist Philosophy?

The two main, closely related, ways in which the question of modernism is raised in European philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century are with respect to philosophical interpretations of artistic modernism and the literary or more broadly artistic qualities of philosophical writing. Each has its source in early German Romanticism, inflected by post‐Hegelian historical consciousness and the experience of the historical avant‐gardes. The two dominant figures here are Adorno and Derrida, in Germany and France, respectively: the former representing a post‐Hegelian, negative dialectical modernism derived from Schönberg and Walter Benjamin; the latter, a post‐Nietzschean, deconstructive poetic modernism, derived from Mallarmé and Heidegger. 71 Adorno's writings exhibit a consistent concern with both issues from his inaugural lecture, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ (1931), to his death in 1969 and the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory , in which they achieve perhaps their most profound speculative unity since the Athenaeum itself, the short‐lived journal of Jena Romanticism, 1798–1800, in which Friedrich Schlegel's ‘Fragments’ first appeared. 72 Derrida's engagement with modernism is more restricted, taking off from more or less the moment Adorno's ends, running from the elaboration of the concept of writing in Of Grammatology (1967) until the end of the ‘middle’ period of his work in 1987 (effectively terminated by the debate on Heidegger's politics, after which his theoretical orientation shifts towards a deconstructive version of a post‐Levinasian Benjaminian messianism). Its high point is the 1974 Glas , a book, appropriately, on Hegel, which consists of two parallel texts set adjacently, in columns, in which the left‐hand text alone discusses Hegel, the right‐hand column containing a series of interrupted and overlaying literary fragments. 73 Both are versions of now classical literary modernisms within the philosophical field, in which the presentational form carries with it an additional philosophical significance derived from the specific form of its resistance to the idealist illusions of the self‐sufficient conceptuality of philosophical texts.

The historical closure of the period represented within Europe by these now canonical philosophical modernisms (we might call it ‘the epoch of historical communism’, 1917–89) raises the question: what does it mean to be a modernist in philosophy today? The answer is, of course, relative to the traditions and trajectories out of which philosophy is written, each of which carries with it sets of presuppositions and arguments forming the starting point for the affirmations of systematically orientated negations. The harder aspect of the question concerns the relations of the qualitative historical novelty of such positions within the philosophical field to that most elusive of creatures, the historical present. This is a question of the politics of modernism. Furthermore, the deeper modernism of the philosophical present is concerned not merely with the affirmation of the ongoing negation of philosophical tradition, but rather, the construction of new ‘traditions’, or new series, through which to think the history to be negated. If Benjamin was a forerunner here, with the philosophical series Baudelaire–Marx–Blanqui–Nietzsche constituting his ‘then’ of the nineteenth century, Gilles Deleuze is the current exemplar with his overlapping series of reconfigurations of the history of philosophy (Spinoza–Nietzsche–Bergson–Dewey and Leibniz–Hume–Nietzsche–Foucault) laying the ground for his own philosophy of difference. To each philosopher (of which there are few), his or her own history of philosophy. Yet the internality of these Deleuzean series (and there are others) to a conventionally construed philosophical field posits this trajectory—in line with his dialectical counterpart in recent French philosophy Alain Badiou—as a neo‐classical modernism, to the extent to which they sidestep that most important of tendencies since Romanticism, the critique of philosophy itself. 74

This is the final aspect of philosophical modernism that I wish to stress: the transdisciplinarity of a post‐Marxian philosophical modernism that affirms the temporal logic of the new through the openness of philosophical discourse to the present as a whole—of which Deleuze's two‐volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Félix Guattari) is itself a model. 75 If, as Adorno argued at the start of the 1960s, the ‘Rimbaudian “ il faut être absolument moderne ” is neither an aesthetic programme nor a programme for aesthetics, but a categorical imperative of philosophy’, then it is equally an imperative to philosophize beyond philosophy. 76

Stephen Melville, ‘On Modernism’, in Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996 ), 3–33.

J. M. Bernstein, ‘Modernism as Philosophy: Stanley Cavell, Antonio Caro, and Chantal Akerman’, in Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006 ), 78–116. See also J. M. Bernstein, ‘Modernism as Aesthetics and Art History’, in James Elkins (ed.), Art History Versus Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2006 ), 241–68.

Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; 2nd edn, 1999 ).

See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1979), trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985 ); The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts , trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002) .

Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant‐Garde (London: Verso, 1995 ), chs 1 and 2; Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting , trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 ), pt 3, ch. 1, pp. 293–342. The following few pages extend the argument of The Politics of Time —from modernity to modernism—in line with the opening section of Peter Osborne, ‘Modernisms and Mediations’, in Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O'Connor (eds), Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices in Art History, Philosophy and Art Practices (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008 ), 163–77.

Augustine, Confessions (398), trans. R. F. Pine‐Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961 ), bk 11. For an account of Augustinian time as the crucible of ‘modern thought’, see Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales From the Conquest of Time (1991), trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996 ), ch. 3: ‘The Time of Novitas : Saint Augustine’, 77–137.

Henri Meschonnic, ‘Modernity, Modernity’, New Literary History , 23 ( 1992 ), 419.

Koselleck, ‘“Neuzeit”: Remarks on the Semantics of the Modern Concepts of Movement’, in Futures Past , 231–66.

In its early eighteenth‐century usage, the term was restricted to linguistic change—‘a modernism’ being ‘a usage, expression or peculiarity of style characteristic of recent times’ ( The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973)).

Charles Baudelaire , ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays , ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 13 .

I take the notion of a time‐determination from Kant's ‘On the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding’, in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787), trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ), 271–7. For Kant, a time‐determination is the schema of a concept, which mediates its intellectual form with sensible representation. Such schemata are conditions of possibility of cognitive experience. Modernism affirms the historical schema, or time‐determination, of the modern, in this sense.

See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982 ).

Peter Osborne, ‘Modernism as Translation’, in Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000 ), 53–62.

Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 9; translation amended. Before ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (composed 1859–60) came ‘The Heroism of Modern Life’—title of sect. 18 of ‘The Salon of 1846’; Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire , ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1965 ), 116–20. See Walter Benjamin , ‘Central Park’, in Selected Writings , iv: 1938–1940 , ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 161–99 , where Benjamin associates Baudelaire's sense of modernity as a ‘conquest’ with what Jules Laforgue called his ‘Americanism’ (p. 166).

Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, 175; Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , trans. Robert Hullot‐Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 ), 27. Fashion, Benjamin remarks, is ‘the eternal recurrence of the new’. See ‘Central Park’, 178.

Michel Foucault, ‘Man and His Doubles’, in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970 ), ch. 9. For Foucault, this doubling was a defect. However, following Balibar, we may read it instead as the structure of a complex and paradoxical historical unity of universality and finitude, i.e. a structure characteristic of all genuinely historical concepts; Étienne Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, in Eduardo Cadava , Peter Connor , and Jean‐Luc Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), 54–5 .

Jürgen Habermas , The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1985), trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) —the German is Diskurs der Moderne . Ch. 11 of Adorno's Introduction to the Sociology of Music , trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1989 ), is entitled ‘Avant‐Garde’—where the German is simply ‘Moderne’ .

Pippin , Modernism as a Philosophical Problem , p. xix. The exception is the work of Stanley Cavell; see n. 3, above.

Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity , 7, 16; Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, trans. Catherine Porter, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 ), 32–50; Jürgen Habermas, ‘Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucault's Lecture on Kant's What Is Enlightenment? ’, in The New Conservatism , trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989 ), 173–9; Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem , 45–60; Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 ), 29–184. The first person to claim Kant as ‘the first real Modernist’ was probably the American art critic Clement Greenberg in his 1960 essay ‘Modernist Painting’, which reads Kant's ‘criticism of reason by reason alone’ as the first instance of modernism as self‐criticism of a medium. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism , ix: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 ), 85–93. Cf. Friedrich Schlegel: ‘Poetry can only be criticized by way of poetry’ (‘Critical Fragment’ 117, in Philosophical Fragments , 14).

Michel Foucault, ‘Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution’ (1984), trans. Colin Gordon, Economy and Society , 15/1 (Feb. 1986 ), 96; ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, 50. As the structure of this chapter shows, the late Foucault's Enlightenment Kant is a thoroughly Baudelairean concoction. See Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Critique?’, in The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997 ), 23–81, for a rather different, earlier view.

Foucault, ‘Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution’, 95.

As even Jameson eventually, if inconsistently, grudgingly acknowledged; Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002 ).

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , 146, 257, 193; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason , trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ), 83.

Osborne, ‘Modernism and Mediations’, 167.

Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics , trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 ).

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 ), 10. The idea that ‘modern’ philosophy is a philosophy of ‘subjectivity’ is Hegel's. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy , iii, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 ), 161. For the philological complexities of the philosophical concept of the subject, see the indispensable entry ‘Suject’, by Étienne Balibar , Barbara Cassin , and Alain de Libera , in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil/Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2004) , trans. David Macey , Radical Philosophy , 138 (July–Aug. 2006), 15–42 .

Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting , 305.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit , 110.

Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy’, in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach , ed. and trans. Zawar Hanfi (New York: Anchor Books, 1972 ), 53–96.

G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences , trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991 ), 140, translation amended; Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse , i: Die Wissenschaft der Logik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), no. lxxxvii, p. 187 .

Hegel , Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse , no. lxxxxi, addition, p. 96 ; trans., p. 147. The Spinoza (Epistle 50) actually reads more simply: determinatio negativo est , ‘determination is negation’.

Ibid. , nos lxxxxiii–lxxxxiv, pp. 198–9 ; trans., p. 149.

Ibid. , no. lxxxxv, p. 203 ; trans., p. 152.

G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics , trans. Bernard Bosanquet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 ), 87.

Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’, in The Fiery Brook , 175–245. Nietzsche's   Beyond Good and Evil (1886) , written immediately after Thus Spoke Zarathustra , bears the subtitle Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future , trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) .

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations , trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ), 57–123; Thus Spoke Zarathustra , trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) ; The Will to Power , trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. G. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968) .

See Paul de Man , ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. p. 146 .

Immanuel Kant , Critique of the Power of Judgment , trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 90 .

Ibid. 159 ; my emphasis.

Ibid. 104 ; Nietzsche , Untimely Meditations , 59 . Unfortunately, this edition covers over the connection by translating zu beleben as ‘invigorating’.

Ibid. 63, 21.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality , trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ).

Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Une Saison en enfer’, in Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 1962 ), 346.

Nietzsche, The Will to Power , 619.

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy , trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983 ), 176. For the distinction between a primary (Dionysian) and secondary (Zarathustrean) affirmation, and the claim that only ‘the two affirmations constitute the power of affirming as whole’, see pp. 186, 189–94. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Robert Gooding‐Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001 ).

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy , 185, 191, 198.

Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy , 68–72; Nietzsche, The Will to Power , 1053, 1056, 58, 28.

‘There is no possible compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche’ (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy , 195).

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) , trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin/New Left Books, 1973 ), 488; translation amended.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto , in Collected Works , vi (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976 ), 477–512. See Peter Osborne, ‘Remember the Future? The Communist Manifesto as Cultural‐Historical Form’, in Philosophy in Cultural Theory , 63–77; and more generally, Peter Osborne, ‘Marx and the Philosophy of Time’, Radical Philosophy , 147 (Jan.–Feb. 2008 ), 15–22. Marx's modernism was historico‐philosophical, rather than ontological.

Benjamin, ‘Central Park’, 167.

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche , trans. David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi, and Joan Stambaugh, 4 vols (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979 –87). The lectures were delivered 1936–40. For a review of the literature on the relationship of Heidegger's philosophy to his politics, occasioned by Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism (1987), trans. Paul Burrell (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989 ), see Peter Osborne, ‘Tactics, Ethics, or Temporality? Heidegger's Politics Reviewed’, Radical Philosophy , 70 (Mar.–Apr. 1995 ), 16–28.

See e.g. Jacques Derrida, ‘Ousia and Gramme: A Note on a Note from Being and Time ’ (1968), in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 ), 29–67.

Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 ), 113, 452—the second phrase comes from a letter to Rudolf Bultmann.

Edmund Husserl , The Phenomenology of Internal Time‐Consciousness , trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964) .

Ibid. 369 .

See Jeffery Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 ); Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 ).

Martin Heidegger , Being and Time , trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 374, 307, 424–4 .

Ibid. 444 .

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999 ), ‘Convolut N: On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’, [N 3a], 464. For the claim that Benjamin's entire intellectual project was shaped by its opposition to Heidegger, see Howard Caygill, ‘Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994 ), 1–31. See also in that volume, Peter Osborne, ‘Small‐Scale Victories, Large‐Scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin's Politics of Time’, for an overview of Benjamin's work as a politics of time, 59–109.

Benjamin, The Arcades Project , [N 9a, 8 ], 474. Nietzsche 's ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages’ furnishes the epigram to the twelfth fragment of the so‐called ‘theses’, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) , in Benjamin, Selected Writings , iv. 394.

Benjamin, The Arcades Project , [N 2a, 3] (translation amended), [N 3, 1], pp. 462–3; Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen‐Werk , in Gesammelte Schriften , v (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991 ), 576–8.

Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, pp. 396–7. In this well‐known text, Benjamin's reflections acquire a melancholic air, absent from the more activist ‘Convolut N’ in The Arcades Project , from which they largely derive.

Benjamin , The Arcades Project , [N 9a, 7], 474.

Ibid. , [N 1, 10], 458 , translation amended; Das Passagen‐Werk , 572.

Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Athenaeum’, in The Infinite Conversation , trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 ), 351–9; Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe and Jean‐Luc Nancy , The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism , trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New York: SUNY Press, 1988) . This was fundamental to Benjamin's own intellectual development. See his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1920), in Selected Writings , i: 1913–1926 , ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 116–200 .

Benjamin, The Arcades Project , [N 2, 3], 460.

See Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1996 ); Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990 ); Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986 ); Geoff Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 ).

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Telos , 31 ( 1977 ), 120–33; Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Athenaeum Fragments’, in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments , trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 ), 23.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974 ); Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question , trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) ; Glas , trans. John P. Leavey, Jr , and Richard Rand (Lincoln Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) .

This aspect is most pronounced in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? , trans. Graham Burchill and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994 ). For the argument with respect to Badiou, see Peter Osborne, ‘Neo‐Classic: Alain Badiou's Being and Event ’, Radical Philosophy , 142 (Mar.–Apr. 2007 ), 19–29.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti‐Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 ); A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) .

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy?’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords , trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989 ), 5–17. For the beginnings of a confrontation between Adornoian and Deleuzean problematics on this issue, see Peter Osborne and Éric Alliez, ‘Philosophy and Contemporary Art, After Adorno and Deleuze: An Exchange’, in Robert Garnet and Andrew Hunt (eds), Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis (London: Bookworks, 2008 ), 35–64.

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Essay on Modern Philosophy by “Descartes”

Descartes is a famous philosopher who has contributed significantly to today’s philosophy. Descartes lived at the close medieval period and thus influenced significant changes, especially in religion, human inventions, and general science. For instance, at the starting of the 15 th  century, Descartes and Copernicus made a great move by inventing the telescope, which could help people in different fields (Guerra, 2021 pp 114). The invention of telescope technology motivated more scientists, and thus there were more inventions such as the printing press by Gutenburg around 1485. The invention of the printing press in 1485 reduced manual work such as writing information manually. Therefore, according to philosophy, Descartes plays an important role, especially in human inventions and science. Descartes takes a central position in technology as his arguments try to give a definitive analysis of how the invention started and took the world.

Descartes creates strong arguments, which outline the world’s appearance even before the human invention was introduced in the 18 th  century. Around 1637, Descartes published a book entitled  “Discourse on Method.”  This publication flued an introspective turn to investigate the operations such that the mind can be used to get the truth of human inventions (Cottingham, 2017 pp 34). According to Descartes’s arguments, it’s the nature of the mind to understand things, thus generating the truth of what most philosophers believe they can achieve. Additionally, Descartes stipulates that the mind has many operations; however, the big problem is to isolate those operations since they are the surest ways of the pathway to the truth. Basing Descartes’s arguments, intuition is the most knowledgeable strategy that helps inventors bring more revolution and technological advancements have the world (Adriaenssen  et al.; 2017 Pp 67). Descartes, as a philosopher, clearly states why scientists need sufficient search, especially in modern technology, as they will be in a good position to ensure that they deliver the suitable inventions to the scholars. One of the most interesting philosophical inventions is his mathematical legacy around the 19th century. He discovered cartesian and analytical geometry, which uses more complex algorithms to solve a specific problem.

Personal reaction

Descartes as a philosopher has promoted modern philosophy in the past and the current world. I positively support his arguments, especially in the mathematical legacy and science field since it has shown definitive revolutions since the 19 th  century to the current technology. According to his philosophical arguments, Descartes shows that there is consistency in the human invention which has improved doing things, unlike the past times. His wise arguments create a strong position in modern philosophy since most scientists believe in Descartes’s approach as scientist and philosophy (Peters 2017 pp 24). Additionally, Descartes’s arguments are very persuasive and robust, as they create the truth of mind and logical implementation of the ideas. Descartes’s fiction provided science foundations, such as calculations and scientific laws applied in analyzing the most complex problems. Due to his massive thinking, both religious and scientifically, different authors applied Descartes’s ideas, especially in solving issues that needed more computations and mathematics.

Works cited

Adriaenssen, Han Thomas.  Representation and scepticism from Aquinas to Descartes . Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp 67

Cottingham, John. “Descartes: Meditations on first philosophy: With selections from the objections and replies.” (2017). Pp 34

Guerra, Marc D. “8. DESCARTES, LOCKE, AND THE VIRTUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL.”  The Science of Modern Virtue . Cornell University Press, 2021. 143-159.

Peters, Michael A. “Subjectivity after Descartes: Wittgenstein as a pedagogical philosopher.”  A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education . Springer, Singapore, 2017. 29-42.

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Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

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“In  Look Alive Out There,  whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on  Gossip Girl,  befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors—Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris—and crafted something rare, affecting, and true.”

Fl â neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London  by Lauren Elkin

“Part cultural meander, part memoir,  Flâneuse  takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such  flâneuses  as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis.”

Idiophone  by Amy Fusselman

“Leaping from ballet to quiltmaking, from the The Nutcracker to an Annie-B Parson interview,  Idiophone  is a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction. Amy Fusselman’s compact, beautifully digressive essay feels both surprising and effortless, fueled by broad-ranging curiosity, and, fundamentally, joy.”

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture  by Roxane Gay

“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

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The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of Lectures (1892) Paperback

• Language English
• Publisher Cornell University Library
• Dimensions 4.75 x 1.37 x 7.75 inches
• ISBN-10 1112153055
• ISBN-13 978-1112153051
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Product details

• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1112153055
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1112153051
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.39 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.75 x 1.37 x 7.75 inches

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Josiah royce.

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