»Geister der Gegenwart« by Wolfram Eilenberger

The risk of thinking for ourselves

What philosophy can still guide us today? Following in the footsteps of Theodor W. Adorno, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, and Paul K. Feyerabend, »Geister der Gegenwart« [Ghosts of the Present] creates a grand panorama of postwar thought in the West. Wolfram Eilenberger gives a gripping account of the dawn of a new Enlightenment that leads directly to the fault lines of our time. 

Winter 1949: Theodor W. Adorno returns from the United States to a devastated Frankfurt; Paul K. Feyerabend, wounded in the war, returns to Vienna. The wunderkind Susan Sontag visits Thomas Mann in Los Angeles. The young Michel Foucault attempts suicide again in Paris. As a result of the catastrophe of the world war, these four self-thinkers sought a new way of philosophizing. In the decades to come, they will revolutionize the way we think about our society, culture, and science.

Wolfram Eilenberger once again presents a narrative masterpiece that uses the example of these four courageous minds to proclaim the power of philosophy to find an exit from the confines of the present. Full of surprising insights and liberating impulses for our time of crisis.