History of Western Philosophy / Critical Theory

A History and Philosophy of Expertise

The Nature and Limits of Authority

Jamie Carlin Watson, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, USA Jamie Carlin Watson tackles the question of expertise and why we can be skeptical of what experts say. His review sketches out the ancient origins of the concept, the evolution of the expert in the middle ages into a type of “genius”, moving to the role of psychological research in 16th-century Germany, the influence of Darwin, the impact of behaviorism and its transformation into the largely cognitive concept psychologists study today. A comprehensive tour from ancient Greece to the 20th century, this book makes a valuable contribution to the contemporary philosophical debates on authority, testimony, disagreement and trust.

UK November 2021 • US November 2021 • 288 pages • 15 bw illus HB 9781350216488 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350216495 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350217669 • £76.50 / $100.32 Bloomsbury Academic

The Relevance of Hegel’s Concept of Philosophy

From Classical German Philosophy to Contemporary Metaphilosophy

Edited by Luca Illetterati, University of Padua, Italy & Giovanna Miolli, University of Padua, Italy In the first systematic treatment of Hegel’s concept of philosophy and all of the different aspects related to it, this collection explores how Hegel and his understanding of his discipline can be put into dialogue with current metaphilosophical inquiries and shed light on the philosophical examination of the nature of philosophy itself. Reflecting the renewed and widespread interest in Hegel seen in analytic philosophy and continental thought, this volume advances study of Hegel’s conceptual tools and provides new readings of traditional philosophical problems.

UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 416 pages HB 9781350162594 • £130.00 / $175.00 ePub 9781350162617 • £117.00 / $153.74 ePdf 9781350162600 • £117.00 / $153.74 Bloomsbury Academic

Walter Benjamin Studies

Andrew Benjamin, Monash University Melbourne, Australia

Benjamin on Fashion

Philipp Ekardt, University of Basel, Switzerland Reconstructing Benjamin’s complex, fragmentary, yet influential ideas about fashion, this book defines Benjamin’s fashion theory, beginning with Convolute B: Fashion in the German thinker’s Arcades Project (1927-1940), tracing it through Theses on the Concept of History and beyond. Situating Benjamin’s thought within the fashion panorama of his moment, this is a crucial text for understanding Benjamin both as a thinker and cultural theorist.

UK August 2021 • US August 2021 • 256 pages PB 9781350262324 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350075993 ePub 9781350076006 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350075986 • £76.50 / $100.32 Series: Walter Benjamin Studies • Bloomsbury Academic Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991)

Mikhail Epstein, Emory University, USA Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein provides a comprehensive account of Russian thought of the second half of the 20th century that is highly sophisticated without losing clarity. It provides new insights into late Soviet Russian nationalism and Eurasianism, religious thought, cosmism and esoterism, and postmodernism and conceptualism. Epstein shows how Russian philosophy has long been trapped in an intellectual prison of its own making as it sought to create its own utopia. A new and exciting interpretation of recent Russian intellectual history and an opportunity to rethink our philosophical heritage.

UK October 2021 • US October 2021 • 272 pages HB 9781501350597 • £90.00 / $120.00 ePub 9781501350610 • £83.60 / $108.00 ePdf 9781501350603 • £83.60 / $108.00 Bloomsbury Academic

Hegel on Possibility

Dialectics, Contradiction, and Modality

Nahum Brown, Miyazaki Interantional College, Japan Whilst providing a clear and detailed examination of Hegel’s Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit, this book reads Hegel not as a philosopher of necessity, rationality, and finitude, but as a philosopher as possibility. Nahum Brown not only investigates the historical background to Hegel’s concept of immanent possibility, but further draws out the implications of his view, revealing the Hegelian underpinnings of our conception of reality and what it means to be in the world we live in.

UK August 2021 • US August 2021 • 248 pages PB 9781350262348 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350081697 ePub 9781350081710 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350081703 • £76.50 / $100.32 Bloomsbury Academic

Modernism Between Benjamin and Goethe

Matthew Charles, University of Westminster, UK

"In this well-informed and wide-ranging investigation, Matthew Charles presents a complex Goethean perspective for the reading of Walter Benjamin and for modernist studies generally. His is a Goethe who has passed through the afterlives of Romanticism, making possible a postromantic classicism positioned beyond the classical antinomies."

Howard Eiland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

UK June 2021 • US June 2021 • 240 pages PB 9781350267374 • £28.99 / $39.95 Previously published in HB 9781350013971 ePub 9781350013957 • £81.00 / $106.83 ePdf 9781350013940 • £81.00 / $106.83 Series: Walter Benjamin Studies • Bloomsbury Academic