A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes

WARNING

You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com

Witold Gombrowicz; Translated by Benjamin Ivry

View Inside Format: PB-with Flaps
Price: $9.95
YUP
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.

Also Available in:
Cloth
Paper
e-book

In a small literary gem full of sardonic wit, brilliant insights, and provocative criticism Witold Gombrowicz discusses Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger in six "one-hour" essays—and addresses Marxism in a "fifteen-minute" piece.

"Who hasn't wished for a painless way to find out what the big shots of philosophy—Hegel and Kant, Nietzsche and Sartre—thought of the human condition? It has never been easy reading such formidable thinkers, and most explainers and textbooks either get it wrong or massacre the language. So imagine my pleasure in opening Witold Gombrowicz's Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, an exceptional effort at summarizing concepts in bold, declarative sentences. . . . [This book] is like the course in philosophy you wish you had taken."—David Lehman, Bloomberg News

"A must for every reader of Gombrowicz."—Denis Hollier, New York University

Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) is the author of Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk, Cosmos, and Pornografia, the first three available from Yale University Press. These, along with his plays and his Diary, have been translated into more than thirty languages. Benjamin Ivry is an American writer on the arts, broadcaster, and translator.

“Brilliantly, savagely funny. . . . Gombrowicz is that rare writer in whom the weight of a powerful intellect is leavened by both linguistic daring and an infectious sense of whimsy.”—Benjamin Paloff, The Nation

“Who hasn’t wished for a painless way to find out what the big shots of philosophy—Hegel and Kant, Nietzsche and Sartre—thought of the human condition? It has never been easy reading such formidable thinkers, and most explainers and textbooks either get it wrong or massacre the language. So imagine my pleasure in opening Witold Gombrowicz’s Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, an exceptional effort at summarizing concepts in bold, declarative sentences. . . . [This book], which he was working on when he died, is like the course in philosophy you wish you had taken.”—David Lehman, Bloomberg News

“[The translation] provide[s] hope that for the first time it may be possible for those lacking fluency in Polish to enjoy this singular talent for all that he is. . . . He is brilliantly, savagely funny—a philosophical, stylistic and comic genius in one. . . . Gombrowicz is that rare writer in whom the weight of a powerful intellect is leavened by both linguistic daring and an infectious sense of whimsy.”—Benjamin Paloff, The Nation

"The language is both earthy and professional, and it jolts the reader into a realization that 'the meaning of meaning' is by no means self-evident. . . . A Guide to Philosophy is vintage Gombrowicz: concise, sober, lucid, and radically agnostic."—Ewa Thompson, Slavic and East European Journal

"A Gombrowicz book holds the spell of a detective novel that grips our attention to the very end. . . . Benjamin Ivry has several fine translations from French to his credit. His Gombrowicz is no exception. Let us simply say that A Guide to Philosophy reads as if it were written in English rather than translated from French. . . . His guide to philosophy is full of jewels of wisdom definitely worth exploring."—Aleksandra Gruzinska, Rocky Mountain News

“A must for every reader of Gombrowicz.”—Denis Hollier, New York University 

ISBN: 9780300181685
Publication Date: April 24, 2012
120 pages, 5 x 7 3/4

Sales Restrictions: For sale in North America only
Polish Memories

Witold Gombrowicz; Translated by Bill Johnston

View details
Ferdydurke

Witold Gombrowicz; Translated by Danuta Borchardt; Foreword

...
View details
Diary

Witold Gombrowicz; Translated by Lillian Vallee

View details
Trans-Atlantyk

An Alternate Translation

Witold Gombrowicz; Translated by Danuta Borchardt

View details
The Margellos World Republic of Letters
Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories

Tadeusz Borowski; Translated from the Polish by Madeline G.

...
View details
Diary

Witold Gombrowicz; Translated by Lillian Vallee

View details
Five Spice Street

Can Xue, Translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

View details
Exemplary Novels

Miguel de Cervantes; Translated from the Spanish by Edith G

...
View details
Songbook

The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba

Umberto Saba; Translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Na

...
View details
The Brazen Plagiarist

Selected Poems

Kiki Dimoula; Translated by Cecile Inglessis Margellos and

...
View details