On the risk of thinking for oneself What philosophy can still guide us today? Following in the footsteps of Theodor W. Adorno, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, and Paul K. Feyerabend, 'Ghosts of the Present' sketches a broad panorama of ideas from the Western post-war era. Wolfram Eilenberger compellingly recounts the dawn of a new Enlightenment, which leads directly to the fault lines of our time. Winter 1949: Theodor W. Adorno returns from the USA to the devastated city of Frankfurt, while Paul K. Feyerabend, wounded in the war, arrives in Vienna. Child prodigy Susan Sontag visits Thomas Mann in Los Angeles. The young Michel Foucault attempts suicide again in Paris. As a consequence of the catastrophe of the Second World War, these four independent thinkers seek their path to a new philosophical approach. Over the following decades, they revolutionize the way we think about our society, culture, and science. Wolfram Eilenberger once again presents a narrative masterpiece, which, through the example of these four courageous minds, proclaims the power of philosophy to find a way out of the constraints of the present. Full of surprising insights and liberating impulses for our time of crisis. Shortlist Tractatus - Essay Prize of the Philosophicum Lech biography Wolfram Eilenberger, born in 1972, is a correspondent for Cicero magazine, a long-time columnist for the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, holds a doctorate in philosophy, and is the author of several books. He is married to a Finnish woman, the father of Finnish-German twins, and not only studied philosophy in Finland but also played in the Finnish second division of football. He can now apply three and a half of the fifteen Finnish legal cases flawlessly, and speaks quite decent Swedish. Wolfram Eilenberger lives with his family in Toronto, Canada; Berlin; and Koivumäki, Finland. New product