I am a graduate in Philosophy with a Masters degree in Contemporary Culture so this theme is enormously interesting for me. My passion has been shifting from literature to contemporary society and culture in general. I love to find the connexions between the current state of affairs and the past. I honestly think that if we look at the lives and times of the great thinkers we can get hints about the state of contemporary society. Understanding what makes us behave and think the way we do it is my main motivation.
What makes us who we are and think the way we do? Why does the world today seem so different from just a few decades ago? These are the questions that Vega’s book, The End of Everything: A society in transition aims to answer. The book offers a thought-provoking examination of the profound changes reshaping our world. Vega explores the rapid transformation of our society, driven by technological advancements, globalization, and evolving cultural norms. What makes The End of Everything particularly compelling is the author’s ability to connect these global trends to their real-world implications, making them relatable and urgent. In a world undergoing rapid transformation, The End of Everything serves as a timely and insightful guide, prompting readers to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of our evolving society.
The figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein has always been quite enigmatic for me.
The enormous contradictions of his life and the intensity of it are difficult to understand in the abstract. Ray Monk's biography contextualizes the life and work of the Austrian philosopher who set out to solve all the problems of philosophy.
Monk's biography stands as a testament to Wittgenstein's enduring influence on our understanding of language, thought, and reality.
Probably this is my favourite and by far the saddest.
The life of Friedich Nietzsche is absolutely essential to understanding his work – perhaps to a greater extent than in any other philosopher. Everything is told here, from the time of his friendship with Wagner, his personal and physical crises and his failed attempts at marriage.
Prideaux's book reads like a novel, although Nietzsche's life is itself a tragic novel. Although it is not a detailed analysis of Nietzsche's Philosophy, this book helps to better understand the work of an essential philosopher to understand the current era.
The Times Biography of the Year Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019
'Outstanding.' The Sunday Times
'A revelation.' Guardian
'Wonderful.' The Times
'Riveting.' New Statesman
Friedrich Nietzsche's work rocked the foundation of Western thinking, and continues to permeate our culture, high and low - yet he is one of history's most misunderstood philosophers. Sue Prideaux's myth-shattering book brings readers into the world of a brilliant, eccentric and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand Nietzsche: the philosopher who foresaw -…
Heidegger is one of those authors who are tremendously interesting but terribly difficult to understand without a good introduction to his general work and his life.
Safranski's intellectual biography is not necessarily the best introduction for a novice, but it is undoubtedly the reference work for the study of the life and work of a philosopher who is considered (along with Wittgenstein) to be the most influential of the 20th century.
Safranski skilfully navigates the complex landscape of Heidegger's life, from his formative years as a young scholar to his association with the Nazi regime during World War II. The book delves into the intellectual development of Heidegger's existential philosophy, providing an overview of his major works and ideas.
One of the century's greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. The story of Heidegger's life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this brilliant biography.
Heidegger grew up in Catholic Germany where, for a chance at pursuing a life of learning, he…
I'll be honest, when I received Benoit Peeters' book on Derrida I was a little worried.
A 600-page tome about one of the most notoriously difficult philosophers. Fortunately, Peeters does not write in a Derridean manner and makes the life journey of the most influential thinker of postmodernism accessible and even entertaining.
Peeters covers Derrida's formative years in Algeria, his academic career, and his development of deconstruction—a philosophical approach that challenged traditional notions of language, meaning, and text interpretation.
This biography of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) tells the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French philosopher in the world - a vulnerable, tormented man who, throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm of the Ecole Normale Superieure, the cluster of structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after. We meet the remarkable series of leading writers…
When I think of Kierkegaard, his story with Regina Olsen, his fiancée, always comes to mind.
What happened during and after their courtship will forever mark the life and work of an author who is considered by many to be the father of existentialism and a key figure in understanding the crisis of modernity in which we are immersed.
Philosopher of the Heart is not just a biography; it's a philosophical exploration that invites readers to engage with Kierkegaard's questions about our individual existence and the search for meaning.
Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement
'This lucid and riveting new biography at once rescuses Kierkegaard from the scholars and shows why he is such an intriguing and useful figure' Observer
Soren Kierkegaard, one of the most passionate and challenging of modern philosophers, is now celebrated as the father of existentialism - yet his contemporaries described him as a philosopher of the heart. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen analysing love and suffering, courage and anxiety, religious longing and defiance, and forging a new philosophical style…
My life and work have been profoundly affected by the central circumstance of my existence: I was born into a very large military Catholic family in the United States of America. As a child surrounded by many others in the 60s, I wrote, performed, and directed family plays with my numerous brothers and sisters. Although I fell in love with a Canadian and moved to Canada, my family of origin still exerts considerable personal influence. My central struggle, coming from that place of chaos, order, and conformity, is to have the courage to live an authentic life based on my own experience of connectedness and individuality, to speak and be heard.
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in the parish, Annie is tortured by her own dishonesty. But when “The Hands” visits her in her bed and when her sister finds herself facing a scandal, Annie discovers her parents will do almost anything to uphold their reputation and keep their secrets safe.
Questioning all she has believed and torn between her own gut instinct and years of Catholic guilt, Annie takes courageous risks to wrest salvation from the tragic sequence of events set in motion by her parents’ betrayal.
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