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Time of the Magicians

Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Great Decade of Philosophy

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Brought to you by Penguin.

The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a jobbing critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance to teach schoolchildren in a provincial Austrian village, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and align his fortunes with the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture at the back of a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold over the next decade. The lives and thought of this quartet will converge and intertwine as each gains world historical significance, between them remaking philosophy.

Time of the Magicians tells the story of this revolution in Western thought through the remarkable and turbulent lives of its four protagonists, showing philosophy not gifted from on high but worked out in the mess of everyday life, and illuminating their ideas with rare clarity.

© Wolfram Eilenberger 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 20th Century Modern Movements Philosophy Metaphysical Mathematics Socialism Morality Humanism
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the narrator cannot speak English correctly, French pronunciation is pitiful and should be locked up for the way he mangled German. It's hard to believe that a serious organization would employ this person as a narrator. Probably he is a very erudite scholar and a good person but not a narrator. An excellent book destroyed

truly dreadful performance

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I’m not far in to this one but so far it is unbelievably bad. The narration is rambling and unapproachable, astoundingly unfocused, a man reading a text that means nothing to him and about which he has no interest. It feels like I have wandered into a dream. Everything is taken for granted, you are expected to have an intense understanding of everything, to know everyone and to understand everything. Nothing is introduced. No backstory is considered necessary. This is unreadable and it is a real wonder that anyone thought it fit for publication as an audiobook in its current form.

What were the publishers thinking.

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