A vision of modern humanity trapped inside the system it has created

Written in the 1960s and unpublished until 2017, Generations is Vilém Flusser’s largest work and the foundation for many of his later theories on media and post-history. In this ambitious study of the Modern Age, Flusser traces a devastating shift in Western civilization that ultimately leads to the modern “apparatus”: the impersonal, cybernetic system of self-programmed objectification that has become our reality.

Flusser presents history as a recurring struggle between generations, with each new generation overturning the values of the former and eventually drifting into a state of existential avoidance. This cycle becomes the basis for a powerful diagnosis of the modern condition. Flusser identifies a critical shift toward self-worship and collective will in humanity’s understanding of progress and divinity during the Renaissance. This shift foregrounded our path toward an automated world driven by apathetic functionaries serving the apparatus and widespread fascist irrationalism, catastrophically realized during the Holocaust.

With surprising relevance to the digital present that gradually empties the world of its grounded reality, Generations offers a striking account of humanity’s relationship to technology, algorithms, and systems of control. Flusser’s concept of the “apparatus” anticipates the modern experience of being shaped by social media, bureaucratic systems, and oppressive technologies. Arguing that contemporary humanity exists in a state of slow existential stagnation rather than dramatic apocalypse, the book asks and answers a pressing question: how did we get here?

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Exploring the rich phenomenological and psychological insights of Gerda Walther

This is the first major study of Gerda Walther (1897–1977), an important but underappreciated figure in the early phenomenological movement and one of the founding members of the coeducational Freiburg Phenomenological Society. Walther saw herself, along with Hedwig Conrad Martius and Edith Stein, as a student of the phenomenological movement charged with the preservation of its philosophical legacy and the extension of its practice. As Antonio Calcagno elucidates in this learned but accessible biographical account, she served as an important bridge between the Freiburg school of phenomenology, marked by Edmund Husserl’s idealism, and the realist branch that emerged in Munich, where she completed her studies with Alexander Pfänder. Her work has remained little known, however, especially to English-language readers.

Calcagno provides a comprehensive picture of Walther’s philosophical corpus and ideas, from her early investigations to her later writings, while highlighting the originality of her own phenomenological work. He shows how she challenged certain key claims of phenomenology and provided unique solutions to the problems she encountered. The phenomenology that Walther leaves us with is deeply marked by her emphasis on the importance of psyche, spirit, and personhood for achieving a phenomenological methodology and understanding. We find in her work a rich phenomenological psychology that explores not only the limit phenomena of the discipline but also the deep structure of inner psychic life framed in personalist terms.