Philosophical temperaments : from Plato to Foucault /

This volume is alternately incisive and obscure, bristling with insights that defy easy dismissal, despite their imperious, sometimes frustrating, brevity and suggestiveness. Compact and pungent, this little book comprises prefaces composed in the 1990s by Peter Sloterdijk, a controversial, high profile, German public intellectual, for a series of primary philosophical texts. Through the series, Sloterdijk (Institute of Design in Karlsruhe and former host of a popular late-night talk show on a major German television station) intended to circumvent the authority of secondary literature and challenge the "rampant mindlessness" of the era with an "alternate history" of the Western philosophical tradition for a general readership facing the challenges and opportunities of an increasingly globalized and virtually networked world. Taking his inspiration from Nietzsche's dictum that all philosophical systems are unconscious "memoirs and confessions" of their creators, Sloterdijk offers a "gallery of character studies and intellectual portraits," ranging in length from 2 to 13 pages. He covers Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Bruno, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Foucault. Overall, this is a scintillating introduction for Anglophone readers to a stimulating provocateur of contemporary European intellectual culture. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. R. A. Sica Jr. Colorado State University