Sean Gaston's The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida is a thorough and thoroughly compelling study of a range of essential concepts associated with 'world' in modernity ... Students of phenomenology, in particular, will benefit from this work, not least of all in its brilliant reading of Jacques Derrida.

- Kevin Hart, Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies, University of Virginia,

This is a rich and original book ... [It] exemplifies the richness of continental philosophy for contemporary issues, social, ethical or political.

- Pol Vandevelde, Professor of Philosophy, Marquette University,

Gaston (English & philosophy, Brunel Univ., UK; The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida) examines how certain prominent 19th- and 20th-century Western and continental philosophers—Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida—dealt with the concept of world. In particular, Gaston is concerned with what he explains as the “need to establish an essential difference between what is merely in the world” and a wider viewing of “the world as a whole.” Beginning with Kant’s transcendental idea of the world and ending with Derrida’s theory of the world as a necessary fiction, Gaston does a fantastic job of using each philosopher’s writings and his own final chapter on contemporary philosophical problems to show how the concept of world is still problematic: we can’t become immersed in the world and simultaneously transcend it to create a unified whole. VERDICT While the work isn’t meant to be an introduction to each philosopher’s theories, its writing is clear and easy to follow so that it will appeal to both readers who are new to philosophy and also to scholars with an interest in continental philosophy.

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