This talk is taken from a chapter of the book I am presently writing, Ideas and World-Making: A Philosophical Historical Anthropology for Social Thought. The core argument of the book is that the recurrent temptation that philosophy keeps succumbing to is the Platonic decision to equate ideas with models rather than with the social process of naming. After outlining the structure of the book as whole, I will focus upon how the ‘anti-domination’ philosophies of the 1960s (which still dominate social theory today) were, in spite of such ostensibly anti-idealist inspirations as Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, yet another philosophical variant of idealism.
Wayne Cristaudo, previously at the University of Adelaide and the University of Hong Kong, is Professor of Politics at Charles Darwin University. He has written and edited 18 books and special journal issues as well as numerous articles and book chapters on a diverse range of topics in philosophy and the history of ideas and social and political institutions. His books include Power, Love and Evil: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged; Religion, Redemption and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy; and A Philosophical History of Love.
