Philosophy for Non-Philosophers

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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 Althussers project. As such, the work is a concentration of the most fundamental theses of Althussers 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 Althussers thought; a thought whose radicality is still perceptible in those that have followed since. Philosophy for Non-philosophers thus provides a vivid encapsulation of Althussers seminal influence on the leading thinkers of today, including Ranciere, Badiou, Balibar, and iek.

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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the non-philosophers while still accumulating one brilliant insight after another for the specialists, this previously unpublished manuscript tackles some of the most fundamental questions of all times: What is philosophy How did it first arise What is its relation to religion, to science,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 * Bruno Bosteels, Visiting Professor Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society Colum Professor Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA *

Author Bio

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).