{"title":"Books by Peter E. Gordon","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780226828572","title":"A Precarious Happiness – Adorno and the Sources of Normativity","description":"A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness—now in paperback.   \"Gordon’s confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism.\"—Jürgen Habermas Theodor Adorno is often portrayed as a totalizing negativist, a scowling contrarian who looked upon modern society with despair. Peter E. Gordon thinks we have this wrong: if Adorno is uncompromising in his critique, it is because he sees in modernity an unfulfilled possibility of human flourishing. In a damaged world, Gordon argues, all happiness is likewise damaged but not wholly absent. Through a comprehensive rereading of Adorno’s work, A Precarious Happiness recovers Adorno’s commitment to traces of happiness—fragments of the good amid the bad. Ultimately, Gordon argues that social criticism, while exposing falsehoods, must also cast a vision for an unrealized better world.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56228728602997,"sku":"9780226828572","price":32.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780226828572_e3b269cc-5c7a-4c1e-9f57-a0a4dbd03687.jpg?v=1786012304"},{"product_id":"9780674064171","title":"Continental Divide – Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos","description":"In the spring of 1929, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer met for a public conversation in Davos, Switzerland. They were arguably the most important thinkers in Europe, and their exchange touched upon the most urgent questions in the history of philosophy: What is human finitude? What is objectivity? What is culture? What is truth? Over the last eighty years the Davos encounter has acquired an allegorical significance, as if it marked an ultimate and irreparable rupture in twentieth-century Continental thought. Here, in a reconstruction at once historical and philosophical, Peter Gordon reexamines the conversation, its origins and its aftermath, resuscitating an event that has become entombed in its own mythology. Through a close and painstaking analysis, Gordon dissects the exchange itself to reveal that it was at core a philosophical disagreement over what it means to be human. But Gordon also shows how the life and work of these two philosophers remained closely intertwined. Their disagreement can be understood only if we appreciate their common point of departure as thinkers of the German interwar crisis, an era of rebellion that touched all of the major philosophical movements of the day—life-philosophy, philosophical anthropology, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and existentialism. As Gordon explains, the Davos debate would continue to both inspire and provoke well after the two men had gone their separate ways. It remains, even today, a touchstone of philosophical memory.   This clear, riveting book will be of great interest not only to philosophers and to historians of philosophy but also to anyone interested in the great intellectual ferment of Europe’s interwar years.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56292803150197,"sku":"9780674064171","price":23.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674064171_932fb77c-51ec-4fe5-86f2-5e832ef13511.jpg?v=1786032773"},{"product_id":"9780300216868","title":"Walter Benjamin – The Pearl Diver","description":"An accessible and authoritative biography of Walter Benjamin that guides the reader through the complexity of his intellectual legacy and the turbulence of his time“A short, serene volume. . . . Gordon avoids treating his subject in allegorical terms, in part because Benjamin always resisted conscription into a story larger than his own.”—Anahid Nersessian, New YorkerWalter Benjamin (1892–1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism—his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving—that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization.   Award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin’s story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin’s life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile, through the romanticism of the youth movements and the conflicts over modernism and Marxism, Gordon brings Benjamin to life.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56367949906293,"sku":"9780300216868","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300216868.jpg?v=1791213425"},{"product_id":"a-precarious-happiness","title":"A Precarious Happiness","description":"A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness—now in paperback.   \"Gordon’s confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism.\"—Jürgen Habermas Theodor Adorno is often portrayed as a totalizing negativist, a scowling contrarian who looked upon modern society with despair. Peter E. Gordon thinks we have this wrong: if Adorno is uncompromising in his critique, it is because he sees in modernity an unfulfilled possibility of human flourishing. In a damaged world, Gordon argues, all happiness is likewise damaged but not wholly absent. Through a comprehensive rereading of Adorno’s work, A Precarious Happiness recovers Adorno’s commitment to traces of happiness—fragments of the good amid the bad. Ultimately, Gordon argues that social criticism, while exposing falsehoods, must also cast a vision for an unrealized better world.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57499149795701,"sku":"9780226854441","price":26.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-peter-e-gordon.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}