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Informationen zum Autor Wolfram Eilenberger is an internationally bestselling author and philosopher. He is the founding editor of Philosophie Magazin and hosts the television program Sternstunde Philosophie on the Swiss public broadcasting network SRF. In 2018, he published Time of the Magicians in Germany. The book instantly became a bestseller there, as well as in Italy and Spain, and won the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It has been translated into thirty languages. Eilenberger has been a prolific contributor of essays and articles to many publications, among them Die Zeit , Der Spiegel , and El País . He has taught at the University of Toronto, Indiana University Bloomington, and Berlin University of the Arts, among other schools. Shaun Whiteside is a prize-winning translator of fiction and nonfiction from German, French, Italian, and Dutch. He also translated Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians . Klappentext "The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history's greatest philosophers. In particular, four women whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century--at once in necessary dialogue and striking contrast with one another. Simone de Beauvoir ... was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg before emigrating to the US in 1926, Ayn Rand was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the 20th century ... Hannah Arendt was developing some of today's most important leftwing ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of de Beauvoir: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war"-- Leseprobe THE PROJECT What's the use of starting if you must stop?" Not a bad way to begin. That was precisely the essay's intended subject: the tension between one's own finite existence and the obvious infinity of the world. After all, it took only a moment's contemplation of this abyss for every plan, every design, every self-appointed goal-be it conquering the globe or mere gardening-to be abandoned to absurdity. In the end, it all boiled down to the same thing. Even if no one else did, time itself would ensure that whatever work one had done came to nothing, consigning it to eternal oblivion. Exactly as if it had never existed. A fate as certain as one's own death. Why then do something rather than nothing? Or, to put it better in the form of a classical trio of questions: "What, then, is the measure of a man? What goals can he set for himself, and what hopes are permitted him?" Yes, that worked. That was it, the structure she was looking for! From her corner table on the second floor of the Café de Flore, Simone de Beauvoir observed the passersby. There they walked. The others. Each one a private consciousness. All moving about with their own concerns and anxieties, their plans and hopes. Exactly as she did herself. Just one among billions. The thought sent shivers down her spine every time. Beauvoir had not agreed to this assignment lightly, not least of all because the subject was one that her publisher, Jean Grenier, had commissioned her to write about. For an anthology on the prevailing intellectual discourse of the day, he wanted her to write something about "existentialism." But neither she nor Jean-Paul Sartre had claimed this term for themselves. It had merely been coined by the arts pages of the newspaper, nothing more. The irony of the assignment was thus hard to overstat...
