4.25 avg rating — 553 ratings

"The lecture on Sein und Zeit"

3.91 avg rating — 837 ratings

"A text to be taught in schools; should be entitled: Propaedeutics in Perception"

4.30 avg rating — 929 ratings

"Outdoes Derrida and Bataille"

4.13 avg rating — 243 ratings

"Difficult to select a single work by JLN, but this volume contains some of 'Globalization', and puts forth his most well crafted examination of metaphysics"

4.01 avg rating — 1,107 ratings

"20th century Gallic philosophers lacked for nothing in ingenuity. "

3.96 avg rating — 42,724 ratings

"Impossible to exclude."

4.07 avg rating — 648 ratings

"Far too overlooked in preference of lesser works. Phenomenology ne plus ultra, although Ponty sure tried. "

4.17 avg rating — 385 ratings

"A book whose ideas dominate your life without you even knowing it. It may take a month to read, but generations have yet to master it. Von Neumann was the most important thinker [qua polymath] of the 20th century."

4.03 avg rating — 5,462 ratings

"If one book has a chance to eclipse Kant simply in its practicality and honesty, this is that work."

4.36 avg rating — 399 ratings

"Vademecum memento mori. Even a king is but a little soul carrying a corpse."

3.68 avg rating — 1,789 ratings

"Descartes was a feint which cost thinkers centuries while science caught up, a science which began with Bacon,the first modern thinker."

4.32 avg rating — 726 ratings

"His points are dismissed by zealots eager to decry all which carries a signet of theology, but for the first time since Socrates, SK cogently evinces faith [that minacious word] is integral to knowledge, as echoed in 20th century by Husserl, Polanyi, et al."

3.95 avg rating — 12,732 ratings

"Impossible to exclude, at least the first book. "

4.17 avg rating — 3,606 ratings

"One can only wonder what his magnum opus would have been like, had he not used it for smoking papers during WWII. Apologies to Walter Benjamin, who gave his life rather than his work."

4.22 avg rating — 161 ratings

"'Homo Sacer' may remain his legacy but this collection shows at his best Agamben is the most interesting living philosopher"

4.16 avg rating — 129 ratings

"The book Ricoeur should have kept on writing, and perhaps tried to with 'Conflict...', et cetera, rather than those monotonous monologues of his oeuvre."

4.13 avg rating — 186 ratings

"Forget Lacanian schizotypy of Zizek, or Baudrillard's fragmentated umbrage, give me a metaphor which doesn't sacrifice its cogency for rhetoric."

4.43 avg rating — 42 ratings

"A man too kind for this world, with the wit of Twain, and patience too pure for modernity "

4.09 avg rating — 457 ratings

"IMO Derrida's works on Husserl are his most lucid and well formed; a disappointing fact that he could never write a worthwhile critique of Heidegger, under whom he briefly studied. "

3.99 avg rating — 35,205 ratings

"'Sein und Zeit' en francais, n'est ce pas? Perhaps France's Bertrand Russell: notoriously perceptive, and for all his renown still disappointingly underachieved. "

4.20 avg rating — 10 ratings

"I suppose one Hegelian on the list can't hurt [William James wrote he got high once on nitrous oxide and then found Hegel not only understandable but rather entertaining] but the value of these essays consists on the ingenius examination of time, overlooked for all that much-to-do of ill-fated Bergsonianism [although I admittedly yet find his work enjoyable]"

4.14 avg rating — 1,225 ratings

"As translation is impossible I will not attempt to transduce my thoughts on why 'Word and Object' was excused for these essays, all I know is that I still wonder how many 'possible-people' stand in the doorway."

4.23 avg rating — 1,615 ratings

"His studious nature allowed Foucault to be a better professor than book-writer. Call it Nabokov Syndrome"

4.22 avg rating — 1,938 ratings

"Neruda would have been unable to explain metaphors to 'Il Postino' if the latter asked in regards to Levinas"

4.03 avg rating — 3,296 ratings

"If Emerson and Marcus Rex don't give you space enough to breath in all these works, Rorty might. No nonsense pragmatism which once evinced the greatest of American thinkers."

4.13 avg rating — 886 ratings

"Before Po-Mo was chic "

4.12 avg rating — 643 ratings

"Another Heidegger disciple [the eighth on this list] who comes across better in brief than by prolix expatiation"

4.27 avg rating — 451 ratings

"A book perhaps dated in portions, or slow, but critically asks: how much of what you know was determined first hand?"

4.26 avg rating — 85 ratings

"Barthes' 'Mythologies' Redux"

4.16 avg rating — 96 ratings

"Wittgenstein at his most recondite: the irony pleases me, et quodlibet falso est."