Mythology, Madness, and Laughter

Markus Gabriel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, USA. He has published a number of books and journal articles in German, including Der Mensch im Mythos (De Gruyter, 2006) and Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift (Bonn University Press, 2006). Slavoj Zizek is one of the world's leading contemporary cultural critics and a hugely prolific author. He is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research, New York, America.

• Introduction; 1. The Mythological Being of Reflection: Hegel and Schelling; 2. Fichte's Laughter; 3. Madness, Habit and Freedom in German Idealism; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

"German post-Kantian idealism was designed to effectuate a shift from epistemology to a new ontology, but without simply regressing to pre-critical metaphysics, contend Gabriel and Zizek. They locate the gap between the alleged absolute thing-in-itself and the relative phenomenal world within the absolute itself. It is a crucial duty of contemporary post-Kantian idealism, to make sense of this shift, they say, in order to contribute to the overcoming of epistemology as prima philosophia. Hegel and Fichte are the idealist figures they concentrate most on." -Eithne O'Leyne, BOOK NEWS, Inc.