18th Century Frenchman Diderot uses a fictional conversation between two men to criticize those who argued against the Enlightenment. As his prior works of political opinion had caused his imprisonment, Diderot was especially careful to craft "Rameau's Nephew" in such a way to not face further trouble.

In a famous Parisian chess café, a down-and-out, HIM, accosts a former acquaintance, ME, who has made good, more or less. They talk about chess, about genius, about good and evil, about music, they gossip about the society in which they move, one of extreme inequality, of corruption, of envy, and about the circle of hangers-on in which the down-and-out abides. The down-and-out from time to time is possessed with movements almost like spasms, in which he imitates, he gestures, he rants. And towards half past five, when the warning bell of the Opera sounds, they part, going their separate ways. Probably completed in 1772-73, Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew fascinated Goethe, Hegel, Engels and Freud in turn, achieving a literary-philosophical status that no other work by Diderot shares. This interactive, multi-media and bilingual edition offers a brand new translation of Diderot’s famous dialogue, and it also gives the reader much more. Portraits and biographies of the numerous individuals mentioned in the text, from minor actresses to senior government officials, enable the reader to see the people Diderot describes, and provide a window onto the complex social and political context that forms the backdrop to the dialogue. Links to musical pieces specially selected by Pascal Duc and performed by students of the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, illuminate the wider musical context of the work, enlarging it far beyond its now widely understood relation to opéra comique. This new edition includes: * Introduction * Original text * English translation * Embedded audio-files * Explanatory notes * Interactive material

Expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Dangling Man is his journal, a wonderful account of his restless wanderings through Chicago's streets, his musings on the past, his psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him, and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

“Now and then,” writes Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

This carefully crafted ebook: "Rameau's Nephew (in a new translation by Ian C. Johnston)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Rameau's Nephew, or the Second Satire is an imaginary philosophical conversation written by Denis Diderot. It was first published in 1805 in German translation by Goethe and Goethe's translation was published in French as Le Neveu de Rameau in 1821. The first printing from the original manuscript was not made until 1891. The work, in a new translation by Ian C. Johnston, takes the form of a conversation between "Moi," a representative of the author, and "Lui," a young, cynical bohemian nephew of the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. As they display their wit and show off their knowledge, the conversation begins to resemble a chess game with its gambits and sly stratagems. The two men satirize society, in which mediocrity is allowed to flourish, and discuss the nature of genius, music, and art. Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert.

From Diderot's 18th-century masterpiece: elegant renderings of architectural landmarks; drawings and plans for theaters, windmills, bridges, boats; renderings of palatial interiors and furnishings; scenes of 18th-century craftsmen at work in the building trades; more.

Master philosopher and cultural theorist tackles the founder of modern dialectics In this major new study, the philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers a new reading of Hegel’s foundational text Phenomenology of Spirit. In contrast to those who see the Phenomenology as a closed system ending with Absolute Spirit, Jameson’s reading presents an open work in which Hegel has not yet reconstituted himself in terms of a systematic philosophy (Hegelianism) and in which the moments of the dialectic and its levels have not yet been formalized. Hegel’s text executes a dazzling variety of changes on conceptual relationships, in terms with are never allowed to freeze over and become reified in purely philosophical named concepts. The ending, on the aftermath of the French Revolution, is interpreted by Jameson, contra Fukuyama’s “end of history,” as a provisional stalemate between the political and the social, which is here extrapolated to our own time.