Customer Reviews

The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

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If you're an ocd -follower of hegel, you'll have to purchase this book. The current trend in philosophy is hegel and language. This book was well ahead of its time. Instead of a network of propositions, it's a network of signs. Discussions of grammar are limited though. For the graduate level or post-grad level reader.

Professor McCumber is one of the very few modern scholars who actually "gets" Hegel, and here, in a mere 442 pages, he distills Hegel down to a powerful, bitter essence. This is not summer reading, however. You will not want to carry this tome down to the beach or peruse it at poolside. No, this is definitely autumnal reading, best approached with a glass of good claret, a crackling fire in the hearth, and a shaggy dog asleep at your feet. The yellow leaves are piling up on your back lawn. The evening sky has a faintly regretful cast to its clotted clouds. But you, hypocrite lecteur, are happy to be inside with a good book in your lap. You are keeping company with one of the great continental philosophers. The solid weight of the book on your lap reassures you. This, after all, is what reading is all about.

Anyone who is interested enough in philosophy to consider reading this book is not right in the head. I should know, since my father, John McCumber, has banished me to a summer of reading all of his books on philosophy. So from my antiradical epistemological Kantian theorem of chaotic Heidegger viewpoint, you stink!