How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way
Life is Hard
The book is filled to the brim with interesting ideas and arguments, well-chosen illustrations from literature and cinema, and courageous confessions taken from Setiya’s own life.
Reviews
In Nexus Review, professional experts and young talents review classical works, groundbreaking studies and topical essays on art, culture, history, politics and philosophy, combining a critical outlook with a broad vision and an accessible style. The books discussed in Nexus Review offer a broad view of culture, society and history that goes beyond a myopic concern with […]
Philosophy
The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life
Lost in Thought
An excellent example of what it aims to capture: solid, high-quality, splendidly useless thinking in action.
Literature, Philosophy
The Unnamable Present
A wealth of topics: from Baudelaire to Kafka, Benjamin and Weil; from sacrifice to the sacred, the process of secularization and digital society.
History
Time and Power
‘Time and Power’ aims to break with the ingrained belief that cyclical conceptions of time were eclipsed by a linear view of time
Religion, Society
What Are We Doing Here?
Robinson submerges us in her intellectual as well as everyday world, which we finally leave far more knowledgeable and sensitive
History
The Intimacies of Four Continents
Lisa Lowe’s new monograph is indispensable for anyone interested in political theory, history and postcolonialism.
Philosophy
The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind
The Age of Genius
The Age of Genius seems as ambitious and eccentric as any of Grayling’s undertakings, but finds itself undermined by exactly those qualities.
History
Anti-Judaism
Nirenberg’s goals and methods are clearly defined and the end result is an intellectual tour-de-force.
Society
Fatherlands in Mothers’ Hands
Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics
Bringing together psychoanalysis and politics has always been a fascinating, yet challenging task. Salgó attempts to ‘wed’ psychoanalysis with politics. And just as every marriage, this attempt comes with its happy moments as well as its weaknesses.
Culture
and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy
The Two Latin Cultures
This magnificent study, to which no brief summary can do justice, offers a narrative of uncommon density, built upon and expanding a massive body of scholarship.
Music
A Life in Music
Richard Wagner
Geck indirectly shows us the profound transformative force which Wagner retains to this very day and which transcends his life and music.
Philosophy
Friendship
Grayling seeks to define friendship and, in so doing, explores its many forms, facets, charms, and consolations.
History
The History of Half-Forgotten Europe
Vanished Kingdoms
His main priorities are, as he states, to highlight the contrast between times present and times past and to explore the workings of historical memory.
Science
Letters to a Young Scientist
We get to know E.O. Wilson as a man who likes to solve the puzzles nature has in store, and through this process comes to some great discoveries.
Culture
Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist
To Save Everything, Click Here
The phenomena we frame as problems and try to eliminate once and for all should actually be recognized as blessings which contribute in wholly constructive ways to our human well-being and societal organization.
Society
The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
Together
Through colonising people’s life world, the managerial imperative empties informality of content and then recycles it as a tool of management.
Humanism
Rückblicke und Vorblicke
Was ist ein Intellektueller?
Since making one’s standpoint known in public is inevitably part of the concept of the intellectual, it is seen as a phenomenon of (mass media) modernity by most scholars.
Society
The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life
How Much is Enough
Modern liberal theory and neoclassical economics have a virtual monopoly on public discourse.
History
The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956
Iron Curtain
The author’s sensibility, her insights into and delicate description of people’s moral and psychological collapse, make the book particularly powerful.
History
The Song Transformation of China
The Age of Confucian Rule
It was the ethical and philosophical quests by Song intellectuals that shaped Neo-Confucian ideology into the persisting foundation of the Chinese civilized state.
Literature
The Testament of Mary
Tóibín once again hauntingly reminds us that truth is always at least partly subjective, and that individual truths merit the same respect and dignity as their authorized counterparts.
History
Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941
Moscow, The Fourth Rome
The most significant part of the book is the study of state ambition, self-representation, expressed in official rhetoric, cultural politics and writings of the Soviet intellectuals.
Philosophy
A Philosophical History of Love
Uninitiated undergraduates are in for a feast of nourishing ideas about love, whereas their professors will tend to grumble about the book’s smorgasbord character.
History
A Human History of the Mediterranean
The Great Sea
The role of the Mediterranean crossroads in bringing together the people from across it, and far beyond, is highlighted through a narrative style which ensures the place of the story in the history.