Books by Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers' encounter with Aristotle. He argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today.

Traces, a masterwork of twentieth-century philosophy, is the most modest and beautiful proof of Bloch's utopian hermeneutics, taking as its source and its result the simplest, most familiar and yet most striking stories and anecdotes.