Verso Books – serie

Jürgen Habermas must be accounted one of the foremost philosophers and social theorists of the present day. Over several decades he has developed an analysis of modernity which is rooted in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, but offers strikingly novel answers to longstanding questions of critical theory. In these illuminating and wideranging interviews, he recounts for the first time his own intellectual and political biography, and discusses his views on contemporary social theory and social movements. This new edition contains an extended introduction and an additional five interviews in which Habermas considers, among other things, the significance of the Frankfurt School, changing mentalities in postwar Germany, and the relations between ethics, morality and law.

In his most accessible book to date, Roy Bhaskar sets out to diagnose, explain and resolve the 'problems of philosophy'. Plato Etc. reviews all the main areas of the subject: the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science; the philosophy of logic and language; the philosophies of space, time and causality; the philosophy of the social and life sciences and of dialectic; ethics, politics and aesthetics; and the history and sociology of philosophy.Among the issues discussed are the problems of induction and universals, the question of relativism, Heidegger's 'scandal of philosophy' (the search for a proof of the reality of the external world), the nature of moral truth, and the conundrum of free will and determinism. The last two chapters consist of a synoptic account of the development of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to poststructuralism.Plato Etc. seeks to revindicate the idea of the philosophical project, and to demonstrate that Bhaskar's 'dialectical critical realism' has the categorial power to remedy the problem fields of philosophy. The book serves both as an introduction to philosophy and as an invaluable resource for the scholar.

The end of Soviet Socialism signalled to some observers that the ghost of Marx had finally been laid to rest. But history's refusal to grind to a halt and the global credit crisis that began in 2008 have rekindled interest in capitalism's most persistent critic.Written during the mid-nineties, a period of Western complacency and neo-liberal reaction, Marx for Our Times is a critical reading of dialectical materialism as a method of resistance. Without denying the contradictory character of Marx's thought, and with a sensitivity to the plurality of theories it has inspired, Daniel Bensaid sets out to discover what in Marx remains dynamic and relevant in our era of accelerating economic change.Marx's theory emerges, not as a doctrinal system, but as an intellectual tool of social struggle and global transformation in a world where capital continues to dominate social relations.