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Start giftingTime of the Magicians
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBrought to you by Penguin.
The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a jobbing critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance to teach schoolchildren in a provincial Austrian village, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and align his fortunes with the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture at the back of a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold 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 tells the story of this revolution in Western thought through the remarkable and turbulent lives of its four protagonists, showing philosophy not gifted from on high but worked out in the mess of everyday life, and illuminating their ideas with rare clarity.
© Wolfram Eilenberger 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020
Wolfram Eilenberger is a founding editor of Philosophie Magazin and host of the Sternstunde Philosophie television programme. He has taught philosophy at the University of Toronto, Indiana University, the Berlin University of the Arts and ETH Zürich. His most recent book, Time of the Magicians, was a runaway bestseller on publication in Germany, where it won the prestigious Bayerischer Buchpreis, as well as in Spain and Italy, and has been translated into more than thirty languages.