In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life, Louis Althusser penned Philosophy for Non-philosophers. Available here for the first time in English, Philosophy for Non-philosophers constitutes a rigorous and engaged attempt to address a wide reading public unfamiliar with Althusser’s project. As such, the work is a concentration of the most fundamental theses of Althusser’s own ideas, and presents a synthesis of his sprawling and disparate philosophical and political writings. Nowhere else does Althusser push the distinction between philosophy and other disciplines as far, or develop in such detail the concept of ‘practice’. Rather than a work of ‘popular philosophy’, Philosophy for Non-philosophers is a continuation and conglomeration of Althusser’s thought; a thought whose radicality is still perceptible in those that have followed since. Philosophy for Non-philosophers thus provides a vivid encapsulation of Althusser’s seminal influence on the leading thinkers of today, including Ranciere, Badiou, Balibar, and Žižek.
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Acknowledgments Introduction by Warren Montag Note on the text by G.M. Goshgarian Philosophy for Non-Philosophers 1. What Non-philosophers Say 2. Philosophy and Religion The Big Detour 3. Abstraction 4. Technical Abstraction and Scientific Abstraction 5. Philosophical Abstraction 6. The Myth of the State of Nature 7. What is Practice? 8. The Practice of Production 9. Scientific Practice and Idealism 10. Scientific Practice and Materialism 11. Ideological Practice 12. The Ideological State Apparatuses 13. Political Practice 14. Psychoanalytic Practice 15. Artistic Practice 16. Philosophical Practice 17. Dominant Ideology and Philosophy 18. Philosophy as Theoretical Laboratory 19. Ideology and Philosophy 20. Philosophy and the Science of Class Struggle 21. A New Practice of Philosophy 22. The Dialectic: Laws or Theses? Notes Index
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This book presents us Louis Althusser at his very best. Written in a style that is genuinely accessible to the non-philosophers while still accumulating one brilliant insight after another for the specialists, this previously unpublished manuscript tackles some of the most fundamental questions of all times: What is philosophy? How did it first arise? What is its relation to religion, to science, and to politics? In what way is philosophy the class struggle in theory? Why does this struggle take the repeated form of a split between two practices of philosophy, one idealist and the other materialist? And how can we develop a new, aleatory understanding of materialism after Marx?
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Philosophy for Non-Philosophers represents Althusser’s late engagement with the popularization, interrogation and dissemination of the possibilities of philosophical thinking, specifically in relation to the possibility of a philosophical and political practice.
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First translation of a major work by a world-renowned and prominent French philosopher of the twentieth century

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781474299275
Publisert
2017-02-23
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Academic
Vekt
227 gr
Høyde
198 mm
Bredde
129 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
224

Forfatter
Oversetter

Biographical note

Louis Althusser was a prominent French philosopher of the late twentieth century. His works include seminal writings on Marx, and the relation between post-war Marxist thought and other emerging discourses across the humanities (namely, structuralism). His works include, For Marx and Reading Capital. G. M. Goshgarian translates fiction and philosophy from French, German and Armenian into English. He is the editor and translator of several volumes of Althusser's work, including How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2017).