Over the last decade, Leonard Lawlor has established himself as one of the most rigorous, most original and most insightful readers of the French philosophy that first emerged in the 1960s. In Implications of Immanence, he advances further his rich interpretations of Derrida, Foucault and Merleau-Ponty through studies of a range of their texts, including the most recent texts by Derrida. Throughout, Lawlor shows the powerful place and significance of Merleau-Ponty's thought in later French Philosophy, while also identifying the subtle difference that separates his work for that of Derrida and Foucault, and also the subtle difference that separates Derrida from Foucault. This is a set of highly valuable studies that powerfully illuminate both the larger issues of the philosophical tradition and the specific texts under investigation. Especially strong, in my view, are the chapters on "Memoirs of the Blind" and "Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy"; these essays in particular are essential reading to students of these texts by Derrida.

This is a short book--three short chapters--that looks at the texts on conscience in Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's Phenomenology and Heidegger's Being in Time. In each case, Feldman is interested in the relationship between the textuality of the text and the phenomenon of conscience there invoked/evoked. Her claim is that, in each case, language--and metaphorical language in particular--is essential to the realization of conscience. In Hobbes, the word "conscience," when applied to individual certainty, is seen as a metaphorical misuse of its true sense of "shared witnessing." Feldman looks at Hobbes's critique of this metaphorical use, but also at the ways in which Hobbes himself exploits the power of metaphor in his own writing. In Hegel, the conscientious agent must announce her conscientiousness in order to accomplish her reconciliation with the community, but the very language that brings her into community also slips out of her control and has effects she cannot control. Feldman argues that Hegel here shows the way that language is simultaneously performative and rhetorical, both realizing what it announces, but also setting in motion something the effects of which cannot be controlled. In Heidegger, conscience, like being itself, is a matter of possibility, and thus no actuality can be adequate to it. This means, Feldman argues, that no word or deed can ever be other than a metaphor for concience; Heidegger's own text is an attempt to own up to this necessary non-coincidence between language and that of which it speaks. Feldman's treatments of the three texts are compelling in each case, and her work is provocative and exciting in its suggestions about the interpretation of these texts, about the nature of conscience in general, and about language. I recommend this book to students and scholars of contemporary Continental Philosophy in general, and of Hegel and Heidegger in particular.

Male Fantasies is a book I wish many, many people would read. The writing is long-winded, the author's ideas are sometimes (in Volume II) flaky, but the content of the book is too good for this to matter. Theweleit studies the art and literature of a particular group of men--the Freikorps--who were essentially disaffected former soldiers in Germany after the First World War. These men developed their own groups and their own culture, and became the firsts-in-line to man Hitler's new army in the '30s (the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts). What is so fascinating about this book is that it approaches the study of this group by looking at the images of women in their writings. Initially, the author goes in great detail over letters these men wrote; then he looks at their magazines and novels. It turns out that through their images of women, a whole vision of human personal and political reality can be decoded. A particular vision of women (a complex typology of types of women: the mother, the sister, the white nurse, the red nurse, etc.) turns out to be intimately interwoven with a fascist approach to human life--AND this vision turns out to be the core of a great deal of our own imagery and political self-perception. The first 225 pages of Book I are the crucial part to read, and then you can skip around through the rest of Volumes I and II as you see fit. The discussion of Freud and Medusa in this section and the discussion of the notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in the work of Deleuze and Guattar are specially valuable segments. This book is also a good introduction to some important Weimar-era history, especially regarding Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacists. I recommend this book to anyone in the humanities and to any generally intellectually minded adult. If you take the time to get into it, it will change your perception of some important things.

Harry Stack Sullivan's work deserves to be read widely, and is an extremely important antidote to the pharmaceutical-crazy approaches to mental health that are so dominant in the modern world. This book can teach the reader a great deal about how to deal with the dynamics of a therapeutic interview--and more importantly how to understand conversations in general! This approach to understanding communication fits well with Bateson's excellent analyses of the power-dynamics of conversations, and with Laing's and Minuchin's analyses of what happens in familial communications. I think this book should be a MUST-READ before any M.D. or therapist enters the interview room. Along with offering important practical guidance, it can help alert you-as-therapist to ways in which your own issues are inappropriately undermining the therapeutic exchange.

Collingwood is one of the best philosophers in the tradition of the German Idealists--indeed, reading his work will do more to help you to understand Hegel than reading almost anything else will. Aside from being a great philosopher, he is also an extremely clear writer, and he is able, in simple prose, to demonstrate how dialectical ideas have direct and obvious bearing on everyday life. This book should be the basic "organon" for modern philosophers, but it is, sadly, rarely read. Reading this can improve your understanding of logic, of natural science, of induction and deduction, of historical method, of the distinctive nature of philosophy, of language, and more. It is also an excellent companion to his other great work, "Speculum Mentis." If you know Collingwood only from his writings on art and/or history, you owe it to yourself to read this work (and Speculum Mentis), to understand the deeper philosophical context behind those writings. (Of course, if you don't know his important and influential writings on art and history, you should read those too!) This book is of the highest philosophical and literary calibre, and belongs in every serious philosophical library.

This is a rigorous and clear presentation of Derrida's fundamental argument/insight. Lawlor's strategy is to map out carefully the history of Derrida's engagement with Husserl in Derrida's formative period (1954-1967), and to use this development as the key to the interpretation of Derrida's thought. Lawlor is able to make Derrida clear and compelling, while dispelling many familiar prejudices; he simultaneously demonstrates the strength of Husserl's thought, against the facile claim that Derrida's deconstruction is a rejection of Husserlian phenomenology. This is a demanding book to read, because it presupposes a reader with fairly advanced knowledge of--or at least familiarity with--Derrida, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, but for such readers this should be mandatory reading. I recommend this work very highly to any serious student of contemporary European philosophy. (Good complementary texts would include Jay Lampert, _Synthesis and Backwards Reference in Husserl's Logical Investigations_, and Miguel de Beistegui, _Thinking with Heidegger_.)

_Reshaping Reason_ is an excellent and original work of philosophy. In this book, John McCumber rigorously--and clearly--unites major trajectories from within both continental and analytic philosophy to produce a contemporary philosophical standpoint, a new philosophy that is argumentatively rigorous, historically contextualized, and open to the future. Indeed, the book precisely articulates the concepts and methods necessary to maintain these three dimensions of argumentative rigor, historical contextualization and futural openness. McCumber studies the significance (mostly, in the end, detrimental) of Aristotle's concept of "ousia" for our traditional ways of understanding the world, and McCumber offers an alternative approach that stresses the possibility rather than the actuality that characterizes our world. McCumber specially emphasizes the primacy of human experience for setting the terms of meaning of our world, and generating adequate terms and concepts for addressing human relationships is one of the central projects--and accomplishments--of this work. McCumber stresses his notion of "poetic interaction" when studying human relations: in our relations we create the very terms and structures of those relationships, rather than answering to pregiven patterns. McCumber's establishing of four "elemental" forms of relationship (with both healthy and oppressive forms) is particularly insightful. The book ends with a study of the historically unique nature of the government of the United States, and looks at how this structure does and does not address the essential needs of human life. This would be an excellent book for any serious student of philosophy to read, and would also be an excellent choice for classroom use.

The battle of Culloden was, more or less, the last gasp of Scottish independence from the crushing weight of English imperialism. "Bonnie Prince Charlie" offered a hope of returned independence for the more or less feudal Highland clans of Scotland and led them on a short but impressive "invasion" of England, which shortly thereafter turned into a retreat, and ultimately a crushing, bloody defeat at the battle of Culloden. The British, under the management of "Butcher Cumberland" used this as an excuse to exterminate ruthlessly the Highlanders, which they did over the next two years. Prebble tells this whole story brilliantly, especially because his focus is not on the grand exploits of kings and princes, but on the experience of the common people and especially the common soldier. This is an excellent book to read, in order to be reminded of what Hegel called "the slaughter-bench of history": whatever its accomplishments, Western history is a history of ruthless imperialism.

The War of the Roses is the name given the the struggles in the late 1400s between British nobles from the competing houses of York and Lancaster for control of the English throne. The figures involved in these struggles (Richard the Third, Henry the Fifth, etc.) are the subjects of some of Shakespeare's most famous plays and, indeed, their political affairs are dramatic and colourful. The events of this civil war are parallel in style to the struggles in Renaissance Italy that set the context for Machiavelli's "The Prince." Charles Ross's book is a helpful introduction--about 140 pages of reading--to the main developments in these struggles that led shortly thereafter to the rule of Henry VIII, and then Elizabeth I. Ross's interpretation is a bit conservative, but overall he gives a fair sense of what was happening and why. This would be a good first book to read to get a handle on what the "War of the Roses" was about.

Hegel's philosophy claims to be a presuppositionless witnessing to the self-transformations of being: Hegel does not himself speak in his philosophy, does not put forth theses, but simply gives voice to the indwelling expression of being itself. This is quite a claim--unprecedented in the history of philosophy. If Hegel is right, then one should be able to start anywhere, with anything, and, by letting it "speak for itself," one should be able to find the same things Hegel found. Again, if Hegel is right, everything is already spoken for within his philosophy. One way to interpret Derrida's _Glas_ is as a taking up of this invitation. "Is Jean Genet," Derrida might be thought to ask, "already written in Hegel's philosophy?" Derrida's book proceeds by a simple process: reading. He opens Hegel's book, and follows out the demands of reading it. _Glas_ is more or less a documenting of the thoughts that develop in a reading of Hegel: "If this is so, wouldn't this follow? And what about this?" Generally, Derrida's reading raises (progressively more subtle) challenges to Hegel's writing, and then, through continued reading, finds that Hegel's text has already anticipated and accommodated these challenges. And, indeed, as the reading then turns into a reading of Genet, it turns out that Genet's texts themselves give rise to the very dialectic Hegel articulates. This is an exceptionally difficult book. You cannot read it competently without a good knowledge of Hegel and without at least familiarity with Genet. Furthermore, to read it means to make yourself open to having your own views about Hegel (and also about Genet and also about Derrida) change. You must approach this book as Genet approaches the Gospel of John--like a miner entering a mine, unsure he'll get out of the mine again. This book is well worth the read for serious students of Continental Philosophy: both scholars and Hegel and scholars of Derrida will (if they make themselves open to it, and are rigorous) have their presumptions about the other philosopher challenged. Highly recommended, but do some preparation first.