Why read Time of the Magicians?

Book cover of Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

Book description

AN ECONOMIST, GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

A gripping narrative of the intertwined lives of the four philosophers whose ideas reshaped the twentieth century

The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein, scion of one of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Time of the Magicians as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Author

I finally managed to read this book en route from Cambridge to London – my usual commute to the SOAS office, which has helped with reading the amount of books indicated above, especially during train strikes.

Okay, the book is Eurocentric like most Western philosophy, and yes, it should have had more exposure to other ‘magicians’ of thought.

But in entertaining and repeatedly hilarious prose, Eilenberger teases out some extremely interesting anecdotes of some of the most prominent minds of human history: philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer who shaped almost everything that we…

From Arshin's 3 favorite reads in 2023.