This book is something of a revolution in Hegel studies. It is still hotly debated in the halls of academia. But Cyril O'Regan has broken new ground in his effort to answer the postmodern critics like Derrida who charge that the absolute spirit of Hegel is a new myth tantamount to logomachy.

O'Regan focuses directly on the theology of Hegel as a means to organize all of Hegel's philosophy, and he succeeds admirably because Hegel himself centered his philosophy around his theology. That fact has been obscured for generations who have wondered if Hegel was really a Christian or not. Surely many who used his name in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were atheists, and this has colored our perceptions of Hegel.

O'Regan cuts through all those errors. Perhaps only after the fall of the USSR was it possible for O'Regan's ideas to be heard on their own merits. O'Regan shows us in textual detail how Hegel borrowed freely from the ideas of Meister Eckhardt and Jacob Boehme and other well-known quasi-Gnostic Christian mystics. Hegel's theology of the Trinity, specifically, is an exercise in the triads of his speculative dialectic. His treatment of this speculative thought resembles remarkably the mystic utterances of Eckhardt and Boehme, two writers Hegel liked to quote.

O'Regan is an expert in theology as well as in Hegel's philosophy. He is also an expert in literary criticism and in the postmodern critique in particular. His answer to Derrida is rich in detail and insight. His focus is the crisis in Christianity occassioned by the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Hegel was very much aware of this crisis and he sought to answer it in his unique, dialectical manner.

Postmodern deconstruction challenges the closure of meaning and intelligibility, but postmodernists often exhibit a lack of familiarity with the literature of theology. Some theologians say that a narrative about the self's journey to the Divine is one moment within a narrative about God's historical activities that are themselves moments within a narrative of the movement of the Trinity. This is not usually recognized.

O'Regan smiles at Derrida's charge that Hegel gave in to the seductive powers of truth and meaning because that seduction is nothing but the possibility that truth is possible. For Hegel, Christianity must be revitalized and reformed because it lost its power when it lost its vision of the absolute trinity. Christianity needs a speculative rewriting to prevent its decline into impersonalism. Hegel successfully rejoined Spinoza's logical space to a Christian narrative space with a logic that does not reject narrative but sublates and preserves it.

O'Regan smiles at the postmodern charge that Hegel's dialectical Christianity is mere wish-fulfillment, because the logical space of the concept implies a God, a divine history and a realized apocalypse. Is it wish fulfillment if narrative discourse is consoling? Or is this a question about the ontology of discourse? Hegel did not aim at consolation but at the truth; not a superficial truth, but a scientific truth. If consolation was obtained, perhaps it was incidental to Hegel's project.

Hegel's Christianity is actually different from the one that the skeptics, existentialists and postmodernists have criticized. The postmodernist tends to generalize that Christianity is Logomachy regardless of whether it is a narrative or nonnarrative type, an anthropogenic or theogenic type, a religious or philosophical type, or even a superficial or deep theology. O'Regan returns the charge of dogmatism to the postmoderns. The horror of despair over the death of God may only be balanced by the comedy of the skeptic's self-contradiction.

This is one of the most controversial and scholarly books on Hegel that has ever been written. The debate over this book has only begun, and I invite the interested reader to join the debate early. It's only going to get better.

As the books run through, page by page, volume by volume, I am so taken by the author's thorough, rich and comprehenseive knowledge of the history of 18th-Century, militarily, politically, diplomatically and geographically. The author sets the whole stage of European history of that century in front of readers. The power and strength lie in this titanic biography, which turns out to consist of six volumes which totaling more than three thousand pages long, is not only on its sweeping and extensive knowledge of the history in detail, but also on the fact that the author possesses a vast, wide and precious first-hand materials of the King's age, which range from newpapers to memoirs, from documents to correspondences. This is really a comprehensive accounts about this great King in every field, in every turn of history : His stern, unhappy and strict self-trained youth which is astoundingly different from any princes in history, his tremendous merits in military which ranked him to the transcendent generals of the world, his remarkable achievements in domestic reform and reconstruction which hailed him as a great ruler in 18th- Century, his grand attainments in diplomacy which made him known as a prominent diplomat of his time, and his sensational accomplishment in literature which enlisted him as an extraordinarily intellectual prince and man of letters in his century. The author reveals many excellent personalities and qualities of Frederick the Great which will hardly not enormously increase your admiration for this great King: His generosity, his humanity, his unselfishness, his toleraion, his modest, his self-discipline, his standard of morality, his delicacy taste, his hard woking, his steel-iron nerve, his indefatigable will, his exceptional equanimity when facing danger, his talent, his prodigious memory, his arts of conversation, his unfailing enegy and strength, his charming wisdom, his extensive appetite for knowledge, and his impeccable private life. Unlike other authors who write history of their subjects, this author blends his own feeling into his writing with his whole sympathy tipping to his hero and unlimited admiration for the King. You can feel the author loves his hero too profoundly and too much not to defend the King, defend his reputation, defend his honor : He spoke for the King for his shortly running away from the battle field due to his generals constant begging for his leave when the battle was heavily clouded; He refuted the rumor that the King had homosexual liaison by giving the powerful evidence that the King was so noble and so proud of himself that he strongly loathed his body be exposed to any person, even when he was void of consciousness because of being wounded in the battle; and so on. The author also fills his book with many amazing and interesting anecdotes of the King[.] .... Overall, with my whole heart, I highly recommend this book which is really one of the best biographies about Frederick the Great, who is one of the greatest, the most extraordinary and influential histoical figures in the world, which is full of valuable and interesting historical sources.

While Holderlin's poetry is truly brilliant and is his link to modernism, his single novel 'Hyperion' is also a major artistic achievement. Much more profound than its close epistolary relative and predecessor 'Sorrows of Young Werther', 'Hyperion' contains some of the most inticate and elegant prose in all of literature. Holderlin successfully attempts to impose the sonata structure in music upon a novel, and, even if he wrote nothing else, he would still rank among the greatest of German writers. The above is not meant to devalue Holderlin's poetry - his best poems being ineffably beautiful and timeless - but is only intended to bestow upon 'Hyperion' a higher place in Holderlin's oeuvre.

This is a re-print of a study first published in 1870. It covers the immigrant to New York's experience from the sea voyage to their arrival in New York at Castle Gardens and at Ward's Island.

If your immigrant arrived in New York before Ellis Island opened, this book will be enlightening regarding the process they went through.

There are a few interesting engravings in this book showing Castle Gardens and Ward's Island. The only drawback to the book is that it does read like it was written in 1870.

This is about as good a book as the interpretation of Nietzsche by a college philosophy professor and translator from the German might offer for my consideration. The second paragraph of the Introduction is already into the humor of the situation. "Nietzsche is like laughter from a beautiful mouth or in dancing eyes--soon everyone in the room is swept away by hilarity or hysteria, where the line that separates good health from noxious influence is obliterated." (p. xiii). The funny things for me in this book are "an old story that comes from Umbria during the High Middle Ages" (p. 187), the fantasy set "when Nietzsche celebrated his fiftieth birthday in 1894" (p. 251), and notes 8 and 9 of Chapter 6, "see also my PUREST OF BASTARDS, forthcoming," (p. 262).

Chapter 5, "Der Maulwurf/ The Mole," has 17 pages of German with English translations. The little poem:

sole
role
of the
mole
--pp. 118-19

rhymes so much better in English (3 perfect rhymes in 5 words) than in the German translation: "geworfener/ Entwurf/ des/ Maulwurfs" (p. 119). I don't know much about German, so I'm struck that the German word "Entwurf" seems remarkably like J.R.R. Tolkien's Entwives, which were missed so much by Treebeard in Chapter 4 of THE TWO TOWERS that he sang an Elvish song to the hobbits, in which an Entwife sang, "I'll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again: Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!" Chapter 5 of INFECTIOUS NIETZSCHE ends with five pages of a poem, from "Dideldum!" in German and English, from the book HUMORISTISCHER HAUSSCHATZ by Wilhelm Busch (1963), illustrated by 15 cartoons of man and mole in a garden. This must be for comic relief, but adding things like this to a book on philosophy might also count as a reality check.

Among the serious sections in this book, "The Biopositive Effects of Infection" on pages 201-03 mentions "metaphors in motion." The next section mentions "the contagion of chronic indirect illness." (p. 205). There is a bit of psychology in that paragraph. "It may not be a mere contingency that Freud invokes eternal return of the same in the context of re-experiencing trauma. If war neurosis consists in the effort to discharge the excessive energy of the traumatic event through repetition of the original event in active remembrance, if in repetition compulsion the traumatic event is felt again, is re-sented, it may well be that recurrence is essentially bound up with ressentiment." (p. 205) That last word there is in French. Nietzsche used it so much Walter Kaufmann defined it as "a desire for revenge that is born of the sense of being underprivileged." (THE GAY SCIENCE, section 370, note 126, p. 331). It wasn't a big surprise to me, when I was drafted, that I might be sent to Nam, or that I dreamed I was in Vietnam, and when I woke up in the morning, I really was in Vietnam. The joke is that it didn't end there. Just mentioning Nam makes me sound like I was underprivileged enough to think that I have something to complain about, as if I still haven't gotten used to my life being one thing after another, mostly things I shouldn't talk about, especially the worst. It was the new Nixon that was really funny for me. I could never believe that people really wanted a new Nixon, particularly as my commander in chief, if his bright idea was to send me to Cambodia, which was like being re-sented all over again. Comedy is the only excuse for thinking that I understand how this works, and if you don't get that, you might not like this book.

Inside/Outside Nietzsche: Psychoanalytic Explorations is an innovative, scholarly study of the philosophical world Friedrich Nietzsche created for himself and the external world that challenged that philosophy. Social theorist and practicing psychoanalyst Eugene Wolfenstein focuses on the opposition between the principles of psychoanalytic theory and Nietzsche's concepts of the will to power and perspectivism. Wolfenstein brings Nietzschean concepts into the purview of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice, and then conducts a psycho-biography of Nietzsche. Inside/Outside Nietzsche will prove engaging, fascinating, informative reading for students of Nietzschean philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical theory.

It seems an opportune moment, with the United States poised to declare victory in the Second Gulf War, to review this little classic.

Hayek famously declared that his 'Road to Serfdom' was dedicated to socialists of all parties as he warned against the dangers of totalitarian rule for liberal(I use the word advisedly) democracies.

This pamphlet is a reprint of an 1949 essay of Hayek wherein he pursued the dictum of Keynes' contained with the 'General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money' about the influence of ideas.

In the essay Hayek questions the view that intellectuals are original thinkers. For him, original thinkers are few and far between but their ideas and views are percolated through society by the intellectuals. Those 'second-hand dealers in ideas' as Hayek referred to them are not necessarily the greatest scholars or the most brilliant minds but are adept at taking ideas and regurgitating them as teachers or journalists or through some other profession such that they pass through to the general public. Hayek contends that intelligent people consider intelligence to be more important than it is and in the world of men and thus tends to be more socialist orientated as those people view the market with disdain. He recognises that the market is a fundamental part of establishing value through individuals participating in a trial and error system of exchange which the intelligensia overlook but which directly affects them anyway. For Hayek, the battle of ideas was to be won, not by the original thinkers, but by the spread of classical liberal ideas by the class of intellectuals who could be convinced of the power of new, or perhaps not so new, ideas.

As Edwin Feulner, one of the editors, remarks, this article was a clarion call to those who espoused a classical liberal standpoint. Following on from this was the establishment of the free market think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs and other such institutions around the world. The story goes on to celebrate to some degree at least the success in bringing classical liberal ideas to the fore in many countries around the world and the success of some of those ideas.

So far, sort of, so good. A word of warning should be sounded. Whereas I agree with the aims of the paper I am circumspect about the current situation. To me there is more to classical liberal ideas than just a free economy. It does appear from my point of view that the battle of ideas is being won by neo-conservatives and authoritarians of all parties rather than by liberals. Others may disagree but the lesson I have taken from reading this marvellous little book again is that all who rally to the flag of Classical Liberalism need be extra vigilant in these uncertain times against the further development of neo-conservative and authoritarian ideas because they threaten not only the gains that have been made in the last fifty years but also many of the liberties we all cherish in our western democracies.

Liberals of the world, Unite!

I'm currently enrolled in a linguistics class at Tulane University, and we had to read this book so as to give us a cognitivist perspective on semantic theory. It is a well-written book with very helpful exercises to illustrate various experiments performed by linguists and psychologists.

This is a remarkable piece of philosophical exegesis. In a mere 124 pages, Hartnack explicates the arguments of the Science of Logic. What is particularly interesting is that the Danish author is apparently trained in analytic philosophy, which is notoriously hostile to Hegel and all things Continental. Hartnack makes many references to philosophers such as Strawson, Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, and Frege. This is not a mere matter of saying "here's the Analytic Hegel." These references are used conservatively, and only to bring clarity to Hegel's own text. This is not a book that contains the next great "reading" of Hegel a la Kojeve or Hyppolite. But it is perhaps the book that one should seek out if he or she wishes to achieve a nuts and bolts understanding of what is perhaps the most difficult work in the history of philosophy.

Too often Marx and Engels are reduced to philosophical caricatures in order to serve an author's own agenda. Richard Schmitt's book is noteworth for his careful analysis of the enduring issues and insights of Marx and Engels. I enjoyed this refreshing reminder of what all the fuss was about.