I started reading a sample of this two nights ago and was so hooked that I pressed the button last night and bought it. The translation by Shaun Whiteside reads as smooth as silk. Being an idiot, I like books that explain philosophical schools and tools with easy clarity, and this really does it, on a par with AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFE, which I now discover I never put my notes about up here.
TIME OF THE MAGICIANS at Amazon.
A gripping narrative of the intertwined lives of the four philosophers whose ideas reshaped the twentieth century
The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein, scion of one of Europe’s wealthiest families, signs away his inheritance, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and aligns his fortunes with Husserl’s phenomenological school. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture on a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama. Over the next decade the lives and thought of this quartet will converge and intertwine, as each gains world-historical significance, between them remaking philosophy.
Time of the Magicians brings to life this miraculous burst of intellectual creativity, unparalleled in philosophy’s history, and with it an entire era, from post-war exuberance to economic crisis and the emergence of National Socialism.