9 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American philosopher who developed the artworld theory — art is defined by its relationship to an institutional artworld — prompted by Andy Warhol's Brillo Box, and announced the end of art's historical narrative.
North African bishop and theologian who shaped Western Christianity through the doctrines of original sin, grace, predestination, and just war, and produced in the Confessions the first great autobiography of the inner life.
Augustine of Hippo's twenty-two book work written in response to Rome's sack in 410, arguing that history is the struggle between the City of God (love of God) and the City of Man (love of self), and that Christian faith does not depend on Roman political success.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's analysis of how Enlightenment reason, aimed at human liberation, reverses into a new form of domination and myth.
Nietzsche's early unpublished work on pre-Socratic philosophy — Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks — arguing that the pre-Socratics expressed a tragic, life-affirming wisdom later destroyed by Socratic rationalism.
Hungarian Marxist philosopher who developed the concept of reification — social relations appearing as thing-like objective forces — and the theory of class consciousness in History and Class Consciousness.
French philosopher who developed a radical egalitarianism — any hierarchy of intelligence or political capacity is a presupposition that reproduces inequality — and an aesthetic theory grounded in the distribution of the sensible.
German philosopher who developed the idea that each culture and historical period has its own intrinsic value and should be understood on its own terms — the root of historicism and cultural pluralism — against the Enlightenment's universalism.
German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary who developed historical materialism — the base-superstructure thesis — the labor theory of value, alienation, and the theory of class struggle as the driver of history.