Modern Books - Page 12

The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Penguin Classics)

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

bastardized, trite, dogmatic, vulgar thinking relieved ocassionaly by a flash of wit 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 20 people found this review helpful.

So much for the most "lucid" of German prose writers, doesn't anyone think it peculiar his style resembles that of a conspiracy theorist warning us of the perils of the illumati and the freemasons. It is dogmatic to the point of shrill, and surprisingly lacking in real self-confidence. (perhaps he using his rhetoric as a way to convince himself of things not even he can believe.) It is full of vulgar unnatural and irational opinions meant mainly to shock lacking true conviction in the end. There is a constant confusion of thought and feeling, a endless muddying of the waters of interesting thought by a kind of upside down stoicism that could only be the product of a thorougly dacadent romanticism. There is also a kind of disturbing right wing athuritarianism,that is obviously the product of (M. Andre Gide's words )Nietschze's insane jealousy of Christ. He distorts history into a recreation of his own amusing and rather twisted pysche. His rants against christianity, while amusing, are often a attack on liberal christianity, which Nietschze being the ultra right winger he is patently despises. They confirm always a midn that worships strength as a confession of weakness.

Editorial Review:

"Twilight of the Idols", an attack on all the prevalent ideas of his time, offers a lightning tour of his whole philosophy. It also prepares the way for "The Anti-Christ", a final assault on institutional Christianity. Both works show Nietzsche lashing out at self-deception, astounded at how often morality is based on vengefulness and resentment. Both reveal a profound understanding of human mean-spiritedness which still cannot destroy the underlying optimism of Nietzsche, the supreme affirmer among the great philosophers.

The Logic of Sense

Gilles Deleuze

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Post structuralist, post linguistic, post semiotic... 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Logic of sense is a very difficult book to get in toto. I'm not sure that it's even meant to be read that way. The book is arranged in a series of paradoxes that each take on a concept or problematic through which Deleuze undoes the hermeneutics of "meaning" in order to replace it with one built around "sense." What makes this book rewarding is its importance to an understanding of expression and imagination in Anti-Oedipus, and various images and signs in his two cinema books. But it almost takes having read his books on Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson first to get the most out of Deleuze's strange and non-subjective ideas of sense and event. I will agree with the reviewer above that the book leans hard on the Stoics, but to stop there would be to miss Deleuze's project here. He wants to create a logic that establishes sense neither in speech nor in language, neither in sign systems nor in structures. He wants to place the production of sense in a philosophy that has restored its grasp of movement and becoming, has shaken its dogmatic belief in concepts and abstractions, and that creates and affirms through virtual qualities and events that, while communicating in fact and through the repetition of the familiar (order), still relate to and express pure qualities. This is really the companion piece to the cinema books but on literature. I don't know that his theory of sense carries well to performance and social convention. Which is frustrating, because we need a some good theories of social convention and language that can take us past linguistics and speech act theories. This is a fantastic book and one of his most inventive.

Editorial Review:

-- Choice

Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

Rene Descartes, Karl Ameriks, Desmond M. Clarke

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Descartes Meditations on the First Philosophiies 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I needed this book for my doctoral studies. I needed it for research and needed it quickly. I am very pleased with the delivery service and the book

Be careful! 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Be Careful! This is NOT the translation described in the Amazon reviews. It is a the unreadable one by Heffernan. This edition is useful only for its Latin text. The facing English can be used as an aid to the reader, but is often so stiff and convoluted as to be unreadable as English. The fifty-page introduction is full of trivia and misinterpretations. The volume is quite justifiably out of print!

Magesterial work which profoundly changed history 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

In the 17th century, the world underwent dramatic and incredible changes. The Scientific Revolution was gathering pace, Europeans had experienced the Reformation and the Renaissance, and boundaries and horizons in all areas were being expanded and changed at a breakneck pace.

Into this time of upheaval comes Descartes, one of the greatest Philosophers to ever live anywhere in the world. While 'modern' philosophy, which broke off its roots from Scholasticism, does not necessarily begin only with Descartes, it is true in Descartes the agenda of post-Scholastic philosophy is most clearly and beautifully expressed in logical terms.

Descartes's project is to take into account the implications of the scientific revolution for philosophy; for Descartes, it is no longer religious authority or pure philosophical speculation which tells us the most accurate truths about the cosmos, but science based on observation and the use of mathematical and logical methods employed by the aid of natural human reason.

Descartes sets into motion an astonishing project into motion; to basically remove Scholasticism and its corrupt and inept attempts to understand the universe and replace it with a complete and unified system of knowledge, based on certain truths clear and knowable to anyone, whatever their class or background.

Descartes, following a plan of 'meditation', withdraws from the senses and attempts to consider the universe as it is to the intellect. Descartes carefully invokes several skeptical doubts about our knowledge, the existence of the external world, and our own existence and attempts to set out what he felt was true and what is not. The famous phrase 'Cogito ergo sum' is one result, though Descartes's overall system and arguments are more complex.

Descartes argues that the cogito, along with the goodness of God who does not make a creature merely in order to decieve it, ensures there are certain and indutible truths about ourselves and the world which will ensure his project will be a successful one. But Descartes encourages the reader not merely to accept his arguments but to put them into practice themselves, hoping in doing so they will discover new truths about the universe which will be plain to anyone using the light of reason.

Descartes in his other works uses this method as a justification for his approach to science and mathematics. Descartes was in every sense a polymath; a trained lawyer, an excellent writer, a student of human anatomy (in which Descartes made many pioneering experiments and observations), a brilliant philosopher and (for his time) physicist, and a mathematician of genius. However, while much of his science is now plainly wrong and was superseded by better scientists such as Galileo and Newton, the agenda Descartes set for philosophy remains much the same even today, especially in the Analytic tradition. Philosophy owes to Descartes two great achievements, one, in applying more rigorous logical methods to philosophical problems while paying attention to the results of science, and second, the re-introduction of skepticism into philosophy which provides a valuable check against dogmatism, but which would only truely be extended to its fullest possible means by David Hume.

Whether or not one ultimately agrees with Descartes's arguments, it must be acknowledged he is a great geius who stands shoulder to shoulder with people like David Hume, Liebniz, Spinoza and Kant, who all radically changed the way philosophers look at the world and the problems it poses.

Editorial Review:

This authoritative translation by John Cottingham of the Meditations is taken from the much acclaimed three-volume Cambridge edition of the Philosophical Writings of Descartes. It is based on the best available texts and presents Descartes' central metaphysical writings in clear, readable modern English.

Basic Writings: from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964)

Martin Heidegger

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Remarkable Edition 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This volume, published by HarperCollins in the sixties and edited by translator David Farrell Krell serves as the perfect compendium to the thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the most significant thinkers of philosophy in the 20th century. Heidegger's methodology is necessarily difficult, as he is trying to remove himself from the `average-everyday' language we employ; and he is trying to approach the meaning of being concretely and originally. Therefore, stop complaining about the obscurity of his style and work your way through this text, for it will remain one of the major works of European thought.

The first essay is the introductory chapter to Heidegger's opus Being and Time. It is actually rather senseless to read it without going on to read the complete text. However, for those readers who simply want a taste of Heidegger's basic philosophic project and methodology, it is summarized here. He says at the outset: "This question has today been forgotten-although our time considers itself progressive in again affirming `metaphysics.' All the same we believe that we are spared the exertion of rekindling a gigantomachia peri tes ousias [a Battle of Giants concerning Being,' [Plato, Sophist]. But the question touched upon here is hardly an arbitrary one." (41). For Heidegger, philosophy has lost touched with the question `what is the meaning of being, as such?' However, in order to resolve the question of the meaning of Being, you must examine the Being of the questioner, (Dasein), leading us to do fundamental ontology.

The second essay in the collection is titled What is Metaphysics? It is an inaugural address the delimited many of the major ideas he would later expand in Being in Time. In it, Heidegger again examines the meaning of Being, but he also discusses the unheimlichkeit (the uncanny), and Dasein's confrontation with "the nothing" (100), and with attunement and Nihilism generally. This is a particularly famous, though cryptic essay, the major ideas in it are expanded at great lengths by Heidegger in his book `Introduction to Metaphysics,' published later in 1953.

The next essay is titled On the Essence of Truth, and it is particularly difficult. Heidegger begins with: "Our Topic is the essence of truth. The question regarding the essence of truth is not concerned with whether truth is a truth of practical experience or of economic calculation, the truth of a technical consideration or of political sagacity, or, in particular, a truth of scientific research or of artistic composition, or even the truth of thoughtful reflection or cultic belief. The question of essence disregards all this and attends to the one thing that in general distinguishes every `truth' as truth (115). Heidegger will later suggest in the essay that the essence of truth is freedom, or unconcealment. Heidegger does not adhere to radical skepticism, nor does he believe in eternal truths. He is interested in the essence of this question with regard to Da-Sein's `liberation' for `ek-sistence.'

The Origin of the Work of Art is unlike any essay in the history of aesthetic philosophy or criticism, because Heidegger is not at all concerned with the beauty of art, nor with the thinking of the artist. He is interested in the capacity for art to reveal worlds. He writes: "The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground. But men and animals, plants and things, are never present and familiar as unchangeable objects, only to represent incidentally also a fitting environment for the temple, which one fine day is added to what is already there" (168). Heidegger values the art of poetry more than any other. He says, "Art happens as poetry. Poetry is founding in the triple sense of bestowing, grounding, and beginning" (202), and he valued Holderlin, Trakyl, and Rilke above all other poets. Art is an origin, and it serves to preserve the historical existence of man.

One could go on and on. This volume also contains the Letter on Humanism, Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics, the Question Concerning Technology, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, What Calls for Thinking?, the Way to Language, and the End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. They will keep you busy for quite a while.

Editorial Review:

Heidegger's most popular collection of essential writings, now revised and expanded -- includes the 10 key essays plus the introduction to Being and Time.

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (Penguin Classics)

Soren Kierkegaard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Abridged, with no warning on the front 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I mistakenly purchased this without noticing it was abridged. It seems dishonest to only mark this on the back but not the front of the text.

Very Good 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I must admit that I have not completed this book yet. But, what I have read is the most wonderful work of all time. It is philosophy that reads as fiction and fiction that reads as genius.

An undergrad like me cannot do it justice in a review. So, I will let it speak for itself, but buy it. It is wondrous.

Editorial Review:

In Either/Or, using the voices of two characters - the aesthetic young man of part one, called simply 'A', and the ethical Judge Vilhelm of the second section - Kierkegaard reflects upon the search for a meaningful existence, contemplating subjects as diverse as Mozart, drama, boredom, and, in the famous Seducer's Diary, the cynical seduction and ultimate rejection of a young, beautiful woman. A masterpiece of duality, Either/Or is a brilliant exploration of the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical - both meditating ironically and seductively upon Epicurean pleasures, and eloquently expounding the noble virtues of a morally upstanding life.

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont

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Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1996, an article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was published in the cultural studies journal Social Text. Packed with recherché quotations from "postmodern" literary theorists and sociologists of science, and bristling with imposing theorems of mathematical physics, the article addressed the cultural and political implications of the theory of quantum gravity. Later, to the embarrassment of the editors, the author revealed that the essay was a hoax, interweaving absurd pronouncements from eminent intellectuals about mathematics and physics with laudatory--but fatuous--prose.

In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal, the author of the hoax, and Jean Bricmont contend that abuse of science is rampant in postmodernist circles, both in the form of inaccurate and pretentious invocation of scientific and mathematical terminology and in the more insidious form of epistemic relativism. When Sokal and Bricmont expose Jacques Lacan's ignorant misuse of topology, or Julia Kristeva's of set theory, or Luce Irigaray's of fluid mechanics, or Jean Baudrillard's of non-Euclidean geometry, they are on safe ground; it is all too clear that these virtuosi are babbling.

Their discussion of epistemic relativism--roughly, the idea that scientific and mathematical theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions--is less convincing, however, in part because epistemic relativism is not as intrinsically silly as, say, Regis Debray's maunderings about Gödel, and in part because the authors' own grasp of the philosophy of science frequently verges on the naive. Nevertheless, Sokal and Bricmont are to be commended for their spirited resistance to postmodernity's failure to appreciate science for what it is. --Glenn Branch

The World As Will and Representation, In Two Volumes: Vol. I

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Philosophy for independent thinkers 5 out of 5 stars.
18 of 18 people found this review helpful.

Schopenhauer's magnum opus towers high above the silly word games of the analysts. This book is philosophy at its very best- a book that no educated person should miss for Schopenhauer wrote primarily for the layman. Like Nietzsche, he was highly skeptical of the "professionals" of his time. One thing that immediately strikes the reader is Schopenhauer's clear and crisp command of the written word unlike the severe case of abstractionitis that both Hegel and Heidegger seem to suffer from.

The World as Will and Representation clothes Transcendental Idealism in a pessimistic dress and offers a glorious, bold and innovated view of Kant's critical philosophy. Its scope and breadth reaches the outer limitations of human understanding creating a new and beautiful, yet cold and austere, vision that will forever challenge, shake, and destroy most people's views of reality. This book along with Kant's Critique gives a possible answer to one of the most perplexing problems of human understanding: it challenges and attempts to disarm Hume's powerful attack against the perceived "illusion" of causality. Whether it succeeds or not is left to the reader to decide.

Schopenhauer starts where Kant stops and he easily transcends him showing us how the world is a hostile place to live in and how reality is forever unknown to the knower. Few professional philosophers would probably agree with Schopenhauer. This in no way dimishes the value of his philosophy.

It is amazing that today most people simply ignore Schopenhauer and take him as a minor figure in the Western tradition. Part of the reason for this is because of Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, who simply dismissed Schopenhauer and gave him a bad reputation in his popular book "History of Western Philosophy." (This book is heavily biased and is probably one of Russell's worst books causing more harm than good for people new to philosophy.) Russell basically rejected Schopenhauer's work on the premise of hypocrisy since Schopenhauer did not actually practice the philosophy that he preached; yet ironically enough, Russell, being a brilliant logician and no less than the father of modern analytic philosophy, succumbed to emotionalism via the tu quoque fallacy. (i.e. judging a claim as false based on the character of the person claiming it instead of its truth value)

The best thing to do is to simply read the book yourself. Commentaries are helpful after one has understood the work, never before. It is highly recommended that one read Kant and then follow-up with Schopenhauer's book. (Though many have still profited skipping Kant altogether.) Very few things in life will probably be more important or rewarding than doing this.

Editorial Review:

Volume 1 of the definitive English translation of one of the most important philosophical works of the 19th century, the basic statement in one important stream of post-Kantian thought. Corrects nearly 1,000 errors and omissions in the older Haldane-Kemp translation. For the first time, this edition translates and locates all quotes and provides full index.

The Blue and Brown Books

Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Precursor to the Investigations 4 out of 5 stars.
21 of 21 people found this review helpful.

The so-called "Blue and Brown Books" are in fact Wittgenstein's notes in the period leading up to the publication of his Magnum Opus, the "Philosophical Investigations". As I understand, these notes (as well as many other collections of Wittgenstein's notes that were published postthumously) were never intended to be published. The reason almost all of Wittgenstein's notes were published is his enormous importance in 20th century philosophy and the difficulty in fully understanding his positions.

Ultimately, to understand Wittgenstein one must read the "Philosophical Investigations"; this volume can only assist an advanced student of Wittgenstein in coming to terms with his philosophy, and cannot, in my opinion, serve as introduction to the investigations. Instead, I suggest reading the Investigations along with an introductory or exegetical text such as A. Kenny's "Wittgenstein" or P.M.S. Hacker's "Insight and Illusion", or any number of other texts written with the same purpose in mind.

To sum up: this book is recommended for advanced students as an ancillary to the "Investigations", not as a separate text.

Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th Ed.

Rene Descartes, Donald Cress

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Readable translation of two seminal works of philosophy 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

This is a review of the Donald A. Cress translation of Discouse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes.

Philosophers disagree about everything: except about the fact that modern philosophy begins with Descartes. No contemporary philosophers agree with Descartes' positive views. However, Descartes left Western philosophy with a series of puzzles that it continues to wrestle with: how is it possible to know anything? (Descartes' "dream argument" and "evil genius" argument are powerful sources of philosophical skepticism.) What is the relationship between mind and body? (Descartes argues that there is a fundamental metaphysical difference between the two, so they cannot be identical.) Is there some certain, indubitable foundation for knowledge? (Descartes thought that we need one to escape doubt, and that he could provide it.)

Some historical context helps to explain certain features of his writing. In 1521, Martin Luther was excommunicated, beginning the Protestant Reformation and dividing Christianity. Luther encouraged Christians to read the Bible translated into their own languages (e.g., the King James Bible) and use their own individual judgment to interpret it. In 1543, on his deathbed, Copernicus published his book arguing that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the earth (as had been taught by Aristotle). In 1633, Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to renounce his defense of the Copernican hypothesis.

Given the sharp intellectual controversies of his era, it is not surprising that Descartes says he has "realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them" (59). Descartes concludes that the only way to escape his doubts is to reconstruct his beliefs using his own reason, rather than relying on traditional views. In this respect, he is somewhat like Luther. However, mindful of what happened to Galileo, Descartes begins the Meditations with a letter to the Faculty of Sacred Theology in Paris, defending the orthodoxy of his views and pleading for their support. In addition, Descartes wrote the Discourse in French (his own vernacular), but wrote the Meditations in Latin (the language of the Church), "lest weaker minds be in a position to think that they too ought to set out on this path" that he has followed (51).

If you are going to read only one work by Descartes, I recommend the Meditations. (However, you might want to quickly read Part 4 of the Discourse first, since it gives an overview of the whole Meditations.) In the Meditations, Descartes decides that, paradoxically, the only way to overcome his doubts is to doubt everything that can be doubted, until he finds something absolutely certain, upon which he can build up knowledge. (Descartes is therefore an epistemological foundationalist.) Descartes notes that his senses sometimes deceive him. Furthermore, for all he knows, he is merely dreaming right now that he has a body and is sitting in a room writing. It is hard to maintain such doubts, so Descartes resolves to pretend that an "evil genius, supremely powerful and clever," is attempting to deceive him at every step of the way. Descartes ends his First Meditation in this pit of uncertainty.

In the Second Meditation, Descartes realizes that, even if he is mistaken about everything, he still has to think to be deceived, and if he thinks, then he exists. (In Part Four of the Discourse, he phrases this concisely as "I think, therefore I am.") Descartes then realizes that, while he can conceive of himself as a thinking thing without a body, he cannot conceive of himself as a body that never thinks. So while he may, in fact, have a body, his body and his mind are metaphysically distinct. (Basically, since he can conceive of body and mind as separate, therefore they are, in principle, separate.) Thus, Descartes is a metaphysical dualist.

In the Third Meditation, Descartes argues that God exists. He gives a version of the ontological argument for the existence of God (defended before Descartes by St. Anselm, criticized after Descartes by Kant, and still later resurrected by Alvin Plantinga). Contemporary readers, even ones who believe in God, are unlikely to find Descartes' argument here compelling, but it is an important part of his philosophy. Descartes argues that, since we know that God exists, and since we know that God is all good, we can be sure that our senses and our reason are not fundamentally deceptive. (Why would an all-good God make us prone to systematic mistakes?)

But the Third Meditation suggests a puzzle: since God created us, and God is all-good, why do we humans EVER make mistakes? Descartes' answer in the Fourth Meditation is that belief requires both the intellect, which simply perceives ideas, and the will, which chooses whether to believe those ideas. So long as we only choose to believe ideas that we "clearly and distinctly" (87) perceive, we will only believe what is true. Error occurs when we precipitately choose to believe unclear or confused ideas. (Part Two of the Discourse describes the methodology Descartes recommends in a bit more detail.) This may seem like a trivial claim, but Descartes is actually arguing for something controversial (and probably false): we can and should withhold belief from anything of which we are not absolutely certain, and so long as we use our minds correctly, we can be guaranteed to never believe anything false.

The Fifth Meditation gives an alternative formulation of the ontological argument for the existence of God, and suggests that some ideas (such as those of mathematical objects) are innate, so that, "when I first discover them, it seems I am not so much learning something new as recalling something I knew beforehand" (88).

Finally, in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes turns to material objects and sensory knowledge. His general conclusion is that "I must not rashly admit everything that I seem to derive from the senses; but neither, for that matter, should I call everything into doubt" (97). In general, Descartes is concerned in this meditation with how we can have a God-given faculty for discovering the truth, yet so often be in error over sensory matters (e.g., the Sun appearing to be the size of a fist).

I do not read French or Latin myself, so I cannot comment on the accuracy of the translation. However, I will say that it is very readable. Furthermore, the selected bibliography is helpful. I do miss three things that were left out of this translation, though. First, Descartes meant for the Meditations to be read along with a series of "Objections" written by his correspondents and "Replies" he wrote in response. Second, perhaps the most insightful critic of Descartes was Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, who raised in correspondence what is still generally considered one of the strongest objections to Descartes' dualism: how can soul and body interact if they are as radically distinct as Descartes suggests? Finally, Descartes' Fourth Meditation emphasizes the distinction between having a property "formally" and "eminently." In Cress's original translation of the Meditations, he has a footnote explaining this distinction. That footnote was left out of this enlarged edition. If these three things were included in this translation, I think I would give it five stars instead of four.

Editorial Review:

This new edition contains Donald Cress's completely revised translation of the Meditations (from the corrected Latin edition) and recent corrections to Discourse on Method, bringing this version even closer to Descartes's original, while maintaining the clear and accessible style of a classic teaching edition.

Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet)

Charles Taylor

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One of the most influential philosophers in the English-speaking world, Charles Taylor is internationally renowned for his contributions to political and moral theory, particularly to debates about identity formation, multiculturalism, secularism, and modernity. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor continues his recent reflections on the theme of multiple modernities. To account for the differences among modernities, Taylor sets out his idea of the social imaginary, a broad understanding of the way a given people imagine their collective social life.

Retelling the history of Western modernity, Taylor traces the development of a distinct social imaginary. Animated by the idea of a moral order based on the mutual benefit of equal participants, the Western social imaginary is characterized by three key cultural forms—the economy, the public sphere, and self-governance. Taylor’s account of these cultural formations provides a fresh perspective on how to read the specifics of Western modernity: how we came to imagine society primarily as an economy for exchanging goods and services to promote mutual prosperity, how we began to imagine the public sphere as a metaphorical place for deliberation and discussion among strangers on issues of mutual concern, and how we invented the idea of a self-governing people capable of secular “founding” acts without recourse to transcendent principles. Accessible in length and style, Modern Social Imaginaries offers a clear and concise framework for understanding the structure of modern life in the West and the different forms modernity has taken around the world.