Make the world

Richard David Precht explores the great thinkers of modernity: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and many others. Modernity provokes philosophy! The concept of space as a fixed entity in physics loses significance, and the question of what matter is suddenly appears remarkably unclear. Equally unclear is the question of what life is, and consciousness increasingly becomes a riddle. With Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, the unconscious takes control over humanity and challenges the venerable philosophy of reason. The view of the big picture also seems obstructed: sociology, a new competitor, claims the territory for itself. Philosophy remains relevant only if it creates added value that goes beyond the perspectives of the natural sciences, psychologists, and sociologists. It must engage more closely with the issues, look deeper into life, and describe much more precisely than it has traditionally done. Must philosophy turn the telescope inward, looking deep within, to areas where experimental psychology never reaches? In this way, Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and the new ontologies of Martin Heidegger, Alfred North Whitehead, and Nicolai Hartmann emerge. Should it start with the logic of language? This is what analytical philosophers do following Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. Or is philosophy a thinking in images, metaphors, and interstices, as seen in the works of Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin? Alongside the philosophers' self-clarification, the times radicalize. The First World War shakes Western civilization and calls for radical rethinking. A festival of ideas with a sudden end: the Second World War. Knowledgeable and elegant, Richard David Precht traces the paths of thought in modernity – with their far-reaching consequences extending into our time. Unabridged.