Domenico Losurdo: Liberalism: A Counter-History (2006/2011)

One of Europe’s leading intellectual historians deconstructs liberalism’s dark side.

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.

Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

First published in Italian as Controstoria del Liberalismo, Gius. Laterza & Figli, 2006
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso Books, 2011
ISBN 1844676935, 9781844676934
375 pages

interview with the author, video (Pam Nogales and Ross Wolfe, The Platypus Review)

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-29)

François Dosse: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (2007–)

“In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Félix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was quite unlikely, yet the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, including Anti-Oedipus, What Is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus.

François Dosse, a prominent French intellectual known for his work on the Annales School, structuralism, and biographies of the pivotal intellectuals Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel de Certeau, examines the prolific if improbable relationship between two men of distinct and differing sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and history—particularly the turbulent time of May 1968—play in their monumental work. He also takes the measure of Deleuze and Guattari’s posthumous fortunes and the impact of their thought on intellectual, academic, and professional circles.”

Originally published as Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: biographie croisée, La Découverte, Paris, 2007.

Translated by Deborah Glassman
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2010
European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
ISBN 0231145616, 9780231145619
672 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-11-13)

Justin E. H. Smith: Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (2011)

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In Divine Machines, Justin Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz’s deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. He shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz’s philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines.

Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz’s theoretical interest in the life sciences, Divine Machines takes seriously the philosopher’s own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here Smith reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. He casts Leibniz’s philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, Smith provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2011
ISBN 0691141789, 9780691141787
392 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-1)