Books by Rudiger Safranski

This sterling biography of Germany's greatest writer presents Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as if we are seeing him for the first time.

With equal attention to both the life and work of his subject, Safranski places the visionary skeptic in the context of philosophical predecessors and contemporaries like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and explores the sources of Schopenhauer's profound alienation from their "secularized religion of reason."

According to current deabtes, 'individualization' has frequently been proposed as the conceptual counterpart to 'globalization'. It has often seemed that nothing would be left once these processes have fully unfolded, other than individual human atoms dispersed on a globe without any political, economic or cultural structures.

The story of Heidegger's life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this brilliant biography.