Ray Monk: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990–) [EN, ES, GR]

Ludwig Wittgenstein possessed one of the most acute philosophical minds of the twentieth century. In this incisive portrait, Ray Monk offers a unique insight into the life and work of a modern genius. Wittgenstein was a tortured man who fought his calling in philosophy and never fully came to terms with his gifts. A reluctant Cambridge don, he was uncomfortable in the university setting and believed that a professor could not be an authentic philosopher. In friendship and in love, he was attracted to gentle, intelligent younger men, yet he was so troubled by his own sensuality that these attachments existed mostly in his imagination. Based on previously unpublished Wittgenstein letters and writings, this richly textured biography reveals the connection between the tormented private man and the genius who, in the epoch-making works Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, radically redirected philosophical thought in our time.

Publisher Jonathan Cape, 1990
ISBN 0224027123, 9780224027120
654 pages

review (Colin McGinn, London Review of Books)

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Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (English, PDF, 1990, 92 MB)
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (English, EPUB, 1990)
Ludwig Wittgenstein: El deber de un genio (Spanish, trans. Damian Alou, 2nd ed., 1994/1997, 13 MB, added on 2014-7-28)
Λούντβιχ Βιτγκενστάιν: Το χρέος της μεγαλοφυΐας (Greek, trans. Γρηγόρης Κονδύλης, 1999, 88 MB)

Susan Buck-Morss: The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and The Frankfurt Institute (1977-) [English, Spanish]

Publisher The Free Press, a division of Macmillan Publishing, New York, 1977
ISBN 0029049105
352 pages

review (Gillian Rose, History and Theory)

google books (EN)
Susan Buck-Morss at Monoskop wiki

The Origin of Negative Dialectics (English, 1977)
Origen de la dialéctica negativa (Spanish, trans. Nora Rabotnikof Maskivker, 1981, no OCR)

Peter Sloterdijk: Critique Of Cynical Reason (1983/1988)

In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, another philosophical treatise—polemical in nature, with a title that consciously and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work—appeared in West Germany. Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the 1960’s. Sloterdijk’s finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture, in personal institutional settings; his book is less a history of the impulse than an investigation of its role in the postmodern 1970s and 1980s, among those whose earlier hopes for social change had crumbled and faded away. Sloterdijk thus brings into cultural and political discourse an issue which, though central to the mood of a generation, has remained submerged throughout the current debate about modernity and postmodernity.

With Adorno and Horkeimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as his primary jumping-off point, Sloterdijk also draws upon, and contends with, the poststructuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He defines cynicism as enlightened false consciousness—a sensibility “well off and miserable at the same time,” able to function in the workaday world yet assailed by doubt and paralysis; and, as counterstrategy, proposes the cynicism of antiquity—the sensuality and loud, satiric laughter of Diogenes. Above all, Sloterdijk is determined to resist the amnesia inherent in cynicism. The twentieth-century German historical experience lies behind his work, which closes with a brilliant essay on the Weimar Republic—the fourteen years between a lost war and Hitler’s ascent to power, and a time when the cynical mode first achieved cultural dominance.

Originally published as Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols, 1983 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
Translated by Michael Eldred
Foreword by Andreas Huyssen
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1988
Volume 40 of Theory and History of Literature
ISBN 0816615861, 9780816615865
600 pages

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