Lexington Books
Pages: 344
•
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-7936-0235-0 • Hardback • October 2019 • $142.00 • (£109.00)
978-1-7936-0237-4 • Paperback • April 2023 • $42.99 • (£35.00)
978-1-7936-0236-7 • eBook • October 2019 • $40.50 • (£30.00)
Wayne Cristaudo is professor of political science at Charles Darwin University.
Chapter 1 Ideas and Names – A Philosophical CrossroadChapter 2 Mechanistic Metaphysics, “Way of Ideas”, and the Understanding’s Rule of the Imagination
Chapter 3 Metaphysical Quandaries along the “Way of Ideas”Chapter 4: The Return of the Idea to the Everyday WorldChapter 5 Transcendental, Subjective, and Objective Idealisms: A Matter of AbsolutesChapter 6 Schelling on Thinking and Being: An Absolute to End all AbsolutesChapter 7 Post-Hegelianism – or the Idea in Our Action in 19th Century Philosophy
Chapter 8 The Analytic Retreat to Reason and The Relative Splintering of the Idea
Chapter 9 Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology and Heidegger’s Being (an Idea in Spite of Itself)
Chapter 10 The Chosen Path of the Idea(isms) of the 60s: Anti-domination, Limitless Freedomand the Politics and Ethics of the Impossible
Idolizing the Idea: A Critical History of Modern Philosophy is an excellent account of how ideas become tyrannical as the model for the only way of thinking. From the early modern period to the late 1960s, Cristaudo offers a critique of philosophical hubris that is needed among our academics and meritocrats today.
— VoegelinView
“Written with wit, integrity, and a magisterial grasp of the history of ideas, Wayne Cristaudo shows that the most famous and influential philosophers have seldom displayed true love for wisdom, but usually succumbed to the temptation to interpose their own pet theory between mind and object. His alternative account reveals that several barely known but badly neglected minds from the past have taken a more open and dialogic approach to philosophy; these true thinkers have beheld the phenomena of reality with genuine reverence, gained profound insights, and offer much needed intellectual sanity and spiritual ballast for these troubling times.” — Nalin Ranasinghe, Assumption College
“Rarely does one find a wholesale philosophical critique of modern progressive radicalism that deserves to be pondered over and reckoned with by those on the left who feel the need to temper their conviction with sobriety. In Idolizing the Idea Wayne Cristaudo offers just such a critique, with his characteristic perspicacity, erudition, and bite.” — Jiwei Ci, The University of Hong Kong
“This is an extraordinary, timely, and original work, that few scholars working in the academies could produce in our times. In depth and breadth, though not in content, it recalls the works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. It is the sort of book that could only be written by a very senior scholar who has over a life time understood and appropriated the full range of debates in the history of ideas and proffered a novel voice on philosophical and political themes from the Enlightenment through to contemporary concerns. The power of Cristaudo’s vision is matched by the careful detail of his analyses and the evaluation of our contemporary predicaments. There will be much that will be the source of disagreement and further argument arising from this book but there is more importantly much to be learned and reflected upon in this opus magnum.”— Brian Mooney, Charles Darwin University