The work of Jean-Luc Nancy has been taken up by writers ranging from Jacques Derrida to Claude Lefort and all his major works have been translated into English. As many struggle to find meaning at the end of philosophy, his writing has provided the impulse for contemporary philosophical debates around the questions of community, the political and freedom. Situating his work in an explicitly contemporary context - the collapse of communism, the Gulf War, the former Yugoslavia - Nancy has forced the reader to rethink nothing less than what "doing" philosophy entails. The result has been his theory of a loss of "sense", which far from being catastrophic, allows us to think sense, art and community anew. This volume explores this and other ideas in Nancy's work and provides insights into one of the most contemporary philosophers writing in the 20th century. The full range of Nancy's work as a philosopher of the "contemporary" is considered, allowing us to see his engagement with Hegel, Marx, Nietzche, Heidegger, Bataille and Derrida.

Everything you need to know about Plato's Republic in one volume. This book will introduce students to Plato's Republic and facilitate the reader's own dialogue with it, without providing an interpretation or a response on the reader's behalf. Alongside a passage-by-passage commentary on the text, D.J. Sheppard highlights many of the central interpretative challenges faced by the reader and surveys a range of possible responses to them. Designed to be read alongside Plato's text, this approach will be helpful for students and lecturers alike.