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The first English translation of Gilbert Simondon’s wide-ranging course on the philosophical and scientific histories of perception

Translated into English for the first time, Gilbert Simondon’s A Course on Perception: 1964–1965 engages in a wide-ranging inquiry into the structure, operation, and activity of perception. Investigating its history throughout the centuries, Simondon shows how perception continually shapes and is reshaped by various strands of philosophical and scientific thought.

Prior to the advent of the natural sciences, perception functioned as the foundation of philosophical reflection and the sole instrument for acquiring knowledge and truth. Tracing his subject from these roots in antiquity, Simondon’s course draws on the work of other prominent philosophers such as Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, and Bergson to follow the evolving trajectory of perception in the wake of classical Cartesian rationalism. As the realms of biology, physiology, and positivism in the natural sciences emerged with the Modern epoch, perception became a necessary theoretical starting point for philosophical investigations of an organism’s relation to its particular milieu.

Emerging from a course delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris between 1964 and 1965, Simondon utilizes a transdisciplinary approach to better understand the sensitivities that various life forms use to orient themselves in the world, offering a nuanced examination of perception in all its philosophical complexity.

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This book brings together for the first time in English the major writings of Mikhail Epstein, one of post-Soviet Russia's most prominent theoreticians of cultural studies and postmodernism. Written from a non-Western point of view yet informed by a familiarity with Western literary theory, it offers a fresh, lucid perspective on the post-communist literary scene as well as a practical and theoretical introduction to the new discipline of Russian “culturology.”

Recounts Kojève’s key role in the pivotal exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals in the early twentieth century

This book shines critical new light on the story of Alexandre Kojève’s intellectual origins and his role in the emigration of Russian philosophy into the West in the early twentieth century. Trevor Wilson illustrates how Kojève, at once adversarial to the insular communities of émigré philosophy and yet dependent on their networks and ideas for professional success, navigated the specters of the Russian tradition in pursuit of an autonomous self-definition as a philosopher and intellectual.

Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy analyzes the philosopher’s complicated relationship to the interwar diaspora and the complex role played by the Russian tradition in his intellectual formation. Wilson examines Kojève’s early writings in the émigré press on Russian religious philosophy, Soviet politics, and Eurasianism and argues for their enduring relevance for understanding Kojève in his mature period. Crucially, he contextualizes Kojève’s famed seminars on Hegel and examines how Kojève’s thought became embedded in the politics of the Cold War. Based on newly transcribed and translated archival material, he highlights a previously unacknowledged, transnational exchange of ideas between Eastern and Western European intellectuals and shows how it played a pivotal role in twentieth-century intellectual history—and its legacy in the twenty-first.