This book is a collection of specifically commissioned articles on the key continental European philosophical movements since 1914. It shows how each of these bodies of thought has been shaped by their responses to the horrors set in train by World War I, and considers whether we are yet ‘post-post-war’. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914,set in chain a series of crises and re-configurations, which have continued to shape the world for a century: industrialized slaughter, the end (...) of colonialism and European empires, the rise of the USA, economic crises, fascism, Soviet Marxism, the gulags and the Shoah. Nearly all of the major movements in European thinking were forged in, or shaped by, attempts to come to terms with the global trauma of the World Wars. This is the first book to describe the development of these movements after World War I, and as such promises to be of interest to philosophers and historians of philosophy around the world. (shrink)

This article responds to Roland Boer’s Marxism and Theology that offers a unique contribution to understanding the current impasse in revolutionary Left politics and illustrates the importance of the numerous references to theology in Marxist literature. In this response, I focus on Boer's argument of Marxism and Judaeo-Christian theology occupying a similar contested space with respect to their uses of “political myth.” I argue that the key to Boer’s critical project is a two-pronged approach: “materializing” theology and “theologizing” historical materialism. (...) For this critical endeavor to make inroads, it relies not just on the ambivalence of political myth, but also that myths are essential to Marxist theories of emancipation, as well as to Marx’s notion of “the Aufhebung of Religion.” I focus on two figures: Ernst Bloch as a Marxist who emphasizes myth’s emancipatory qualities; and Theodor Adorno as wary of myth while adhering to the theological motif of the bilderverbot. From this analysis, we can begin to see how much Boer’s project depends on a wager on political myth itself. (shrink)

The Great War, as it was known until 1939, set in chain a series of catastrophes and crises that have largely defined the long twentieth century: economic, political, cultural, and metaphysical. Philosophy was not unaffected, either within academe, or more widely. Nearly each of the major philosophical movements, from analytic philosophy through to post-structuralism, was directly or indirectly formed in response to the civilizational crisis the Great War inaugurated, and different perceptions of its causes and significance. This chapter surveys the (...) territory, and looks forwards to the different contributions collected here. (shrink)

In Europe in the annus horriibilis of 1933, Edmund Husserl wrote in an unpublished manuscript: “If such a science indeed leads to God, its road would be to an atheistic God.” Initia...