Raymond Geuss is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His books include Changing the Subject, Reality and Its Dreams, and Who Needs a World View?
Many of the joys of Who Needs a World View? lie not only in the
encouragement Geuss offers to see through the need for a worldview
but also in his pithy and enlightening insights into the works of
the philosophers, artists, and writers he discusses.
*Georgia Warnke, Director, Center for Ideas and Society, University
of California, Riverside*
Raymond Geuss has undertaken in recent years to resuscitate the
genre of the classical philosophical essay, and he has by now made
himself an absolute master of it. This is abundantly evident in his
new collection of essays, which takes us on a vertiginous and often
exhilarating journey that easily passes from Homer to the present
in pursuit of his leading question, ‘Who needs a world view?’
*Hans Sluga, University of California, Berkeley*
Who Needs a World View? is a brilliant collection of essays that
richly yet deftly challenges a broad range of pieties and settled
assumptions on how we are supposed to understand our lives and our
circumstances. Raymond Geuss shares with us the philosophical
motivations behind his approach to those questions, with absorbing
accounts of the two teachers who deeply impressed his thinking.
This is a book of unfailingly resonant, sometimes poignant, and
characteristically timely interventions.
*Brian O’Connor, Professor of Philosophy, University College
Dublin*
Geuss wants to replace collective creeds and manifestos, which tend
to be dogmatic and encompassing, with personal confessions…These
essays glitter with insights…Makes a compelling case, by argument
and example, that one can live well without adopting any view of
one’s life as a whole, let alone a systematic worldview.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Geuss’s startling scholarly range, from ancient Greek and biblical
history to Brexit and Donald Trump, and his command of languages
(French, German, Latin, Greek) and knowledge of figures both
philosophical (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche) and artistic (Bruegel,
Tristan Tzara, Paul Klee, Antonin Artaud) are on full display here,
alongside his usual acuity and wit.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Probing and playful essays.
*Chicago Review of Books*
Some of his most personal [essays] and they have a perceptive depth
to them where each feels like a glimpse at life in its most
spontaneous, creative, unruly, and ultimately, unknowable aspects,
and the implications these have for how we orientate ourselves in
the world.
*Marx and Philosophy*
Geuss [is] among the most renowned philosophical essayists alive
today…In one way or another, all of [his] work sets out to puncture
the pretensions of contemporary Anglophone philosophical
thinking…Who Needs a World View? is perhaps Geuss’s most personal
and existential book yet…This collection of essays confirms Geuss’s
status as a subtle, perceptive, and deep thinker with estimable
gifts and an enviable range.
*Society*
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