Difference and Alterity in La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn
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A01=Willi Goetschel
alterity
Author_Willi Goetschel
Baruch Spinoza
Category=QDH
Category=QDHM
Category=QDHR
difference
early modern philosophy
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eq_nobargain
Etienne de La Boetie
history of philosophy
Michel de Montaigne
Moses Mendelssohn
Product details
- ISBN 9781399545501
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book redirects our attention to a group of thinkers whose project of rethinking difference and alterity assumes new critical significance at the current juncture. Reaching from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the interventions of La Boetie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn are not just history (albeit one problematically assimilated to canonical views), but offer new resources for moving past the politics of tolerance, charity, and recognition.
These thinkers argue for an understanding of otherness that renegotiates the terms of difference and alterity more radically as the conditions of our own existence. From La Boetie's exposure of 'voluntary servitude' as the mechanism behind the tyranny of despotic authority, to the ideas of Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn, these thinkers argue for the critical importance of the deep constitutive nexus between self and other: identity, difference and otherness.
Willi Goetschel is Professor of German and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Heine and Critical Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019), The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (Fordham, 2013), Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Wisconsin, 2004) and Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (Duke, 1994).
