Reviews for Thing of This World

The average rating for Thing of This World based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-20 00:00:00 Jeffrey Pomfret The first real philosophy book I read was Being and Time by Heidegger. It turned out to be my all time favorite book, but it took multiple readings and hundreds of side trips into other philosophers before I could understand what it was really saying. It led me to many other primary philosophy books since I was committed to understanding beyond the superficial because I had realized that there was something big that was being revealed, but initially I was not able to understand it. I accidentally ended up reading all of the philosophers this author mentions in detail such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida, and most of the other ones he mentions in passing in order to understand that book. There was a connecting thread that was tying all my philosophical readings together which I had not been aware of until after having read this book. As with any undisciplined reader who wanted to learn about the world, I would read one book and that often would led me to another book and so on, while I was never reading with an eye toward tying the thought together coherently, I was just letting my readings take me where they took me. This book tied the thought together in a coherent whole for me in ways for which I previously only had a vague feeling. It's easy for me to say something along the lines that this is my favorite book which talks about all of my favorite philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger) in excruciatingly pleasant detail. I had actually been reading many of their works on my own and I knew they were connected because I kept seeing echoes between them but did not understand how they were connected. After having read this book, I know exactly how they all connect. A way to describe Heidegger's Being and Time and this author does is by saying it is a reworking of Kant's anti-realism, Hegel's being as contrasted with nothing, Kierkegaard's being authentic within the world and Nietzsche realization that being is illusive. After B&T, Foucault and Derrida will rework Heidegger's take through Nietzsche or Nietzsche's take as seen by Heidegger, but all within a framework started by Kant's anti-realism as this book will layout. All philosophy up to Kant had a variation of 'the truth is out there' and would state we are able to know truth independently from ourselves as if we were Plato's Ideal, Aristotle's ordered world, Avicenna's Floating Man with a soul or assumed that we had the luxury of assuming the world outside of us away since God is not a trickster and just stating 'cogito ergo sum' in the manner of Descartes. Kant changes the perspective with a Copernicus Revolution of the mind and says that 'the truth is within us' and embraces a mixture of the empirical (Hume) with some idealism (Leibnitz) while siding on the side of an existential reality. Kant's followers as detailed in this book will refine his take and not allow for knowledge that is universal, necessary and certain as Kant does and will take away any pretense for a God's eye view for truth and replace it with a groundless ground that gets at the real world we are thrown into and how we must determine for ourselves our own meaning since there is no authoritative narrative about the narrative (i.e. there is no meta-narrative). This book will say that Bertrand Russell was embarrassingly wrong when it came to Hegel since he did not understand what Hegel was getting at. Hegel's 'absolute knowledge' is not a linear end point but more of a circle the exact opposite from what Russell said and Hegel's individual is part of a whole unlike what Russell would have imagined. Nietzsche's nihilism is not a passive nihilism but an active version as the author will point out in the Nietzsche section. All these kind of things will pop up in this book from time to time and play into the author's major theme that Nietzsche and Hegel can be thought of as anti-realist reacting to what Kant had laid out. The theme of this book will stay with me for a long time. I once read a derogatory statement about Kant in an article that mentioned that Kant was the most Western of all Western philosophers. I wish I had read this book before having read that misleading statement because now I know that Kant broke a mold with what he started and it took Heidegger to synthesize the thought of Kant, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Nietzsche through his deconstruction and Foucault and Derrida built on that by amplifying the 'groundless ground' that helps us with getting meaning since science without metaphysics is empty, and in the end it is up to us to find our most appropriate ground for our own meaning.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-15 00:00:00 Scott Lutren This metanarrative of continental philosophy deserves to become the standard text in philosophy classrooms. Intricately organized with precise articulation and a slough of juicy primary quotes, this is how you will learn the facets of Western continental thought. As Braver admits, he leaves out significant movements like the Frankfurt School, Deleuze, and Gadamer, but the book is already 500 pages, so I can't blame him. Even if you already know this subject well, it's still worth just grabbing this book for the bibliography.