There seems to be a general consensus that the most important Continental philosopher of the twentieth century was Martin Heidegger. Even Étienne Gilson spoke of him as one of only two real philosophers of his lifetime. Despite the general acknowledgment of his philosophical brilliance, Heidegger remains a highly controversial figure in the history of thought largely on account of his infamous involvement with Nazism. In recent years Richard Wolin has gone to great lengths to document and examine Heidegger’s troubling politics (...) and legacy. Wolin claims that Heidegger’s Children is his final offering on Heidegger and his flawed politics; it follows upon his books The Politics of Being and The Heidegger Controversy. (shrink)

Linda Williams has written a solid and comprehensive introduction to Nietzsche’s concept of will to power. She covers all of the fundamental questions and issues that interpreters of Nietzsche must face along with reviewing the strongest interpretative positions and suggesting her own approach.

Film theory has long been dominated by the conflict between formalists and realists. According to Singer, “formalists call attention to the technical means by which a filmmaker goes beyond the real world in order to express his or her artistic vision” while realists “emphasize that film records properties of the physical world that lend themselves to the photographic process”. Singer attempts to ply a middle path, which emphasizes films’ ability to transform reality through both realist and formalist means. The book (...) is divided into three parts with each part consisting of one chapter advancing his theory and another applying his theory to a film. (shrink)

Jerry Muller has written an extraordinarily lucid and insightful intellectual history detailing “the best that has been thought and said in the world” regarding capitalism. The Mind and the Market explores the cultural implications of market capitalism as propounded in the writings of European intellectuals ranging from Voltaire in the mid-eighteenth century to Friedrich Hayek in the mid-twentieth century.

Lukacher claims that the theory of eternal recurrence is the secret alternative approach to time and man’s relation to it in western thought. Eternal recurrence has been buried in philosophy by the dominance of Christian thought and theology and its concomitant linear approach to history. Lukacher seeks to resuscitate the pagan theory by tracing its path of development from the pre-Socratics Heraclitus and Anaximander through Nietzsche and into contemporary thought with Derrida.

In an excellent work on the American legal system, John C. Anderson holds modern legal theory as largely to blame for the gross injustices that he claims commonly occur. Anderson begins by listing a number of examples of legal injustices and then spends the rest of the book explaining why misguided legal theory is to blame. His critique begins with the most representative and influential of twentieth-century legal theorists, Ronald Dworkin, then moves back to Kant, whom he holds to be (...) the intellectual forefather of the errors of modern legal theory. The fourth chapter attempts to rehabilitate Aristotle’s theory of natural justice and the book ends with a series of proposals for correcting the legal system. (shrink)