Aaron Fellbaum

French historian Patrick Boucheron is not only a scholar of the European Middle Ages but also an author who studies the political process, and is well-known for his previous book, France in the World (2019). Boucheron is concerned with the nature of political visions and how they are then instrumentalized by political leaders. The presented analysis of how politicians make use of their “fictions” is also meant to undo the terror exerted by such dominant political narratives. The new book (which is composed of a series of lectures) is already well-received by journals such as The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal among others.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749-1832) oeuvre is so comprehensive that one intuitively wonders what the few fundamental ideas of his thinking are. In the disciplines of the natural sciences alone, his work includes contributions in botany, zoology, anatomy, geology, mineralogy, color theory and much more. But what are the origins of conceptual comprehension in poetry and the origins of our comprehension in modern science? Matthew Bell presents an intellectual biography of the poet, intertwining historical-political context, literary criticism and the history of ideas in Europe. In this new book, the portrayed evolution of the poet’s thought draws on sources translated into English language for the first time.

After the exposition of I. Kant's theory of nature as a mechanism, we turn to Kant's idea that organisms are an exception and cannot be explained through the mechanism of nature. Organisms are characterized through a circular causality. The idea of the whole, an idea of the thinking subject, causes the functioning of organisms. F.W.J.Schelling takes up Kant's conception that the organism is characterized through the interaction of the parts, but he dispenses with the idea of the whole as a causal agent. The part has a generative power to produce the whole. With this, Schelling's Naturphilosophie suggests that mind depends on matter.