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The foreknowledge and fear of death has differentiated humans from animals and gods, giving us a unique place in the world.

Thomas Darby takes the sense of time that death entails and shows its underlying presence in various areas of Western philosophy from the early Greeks to Rousseau and Hegel, especially the Hegel interpreted by Kojeve. His book ranges widely over many academic fields - religion, philosophy, semiotics, as well as politics - and offers an astonishing view of what Hegel thought he was doing in relation to Christianity and Napolean.

It emphasizes the influence of the mystic Jakob Bohme on Hegel's conceptualization of the human world, and concludes with intimations of the technological nihilism detected by Neitzsche and lived in throughout the West today.

Against it, according to Kojeve, stands only the Shintoism of Japan, a mannered and snobbish cult of the soul alone in a world dedicated to bodies and the exorcism of chance and death and time as history. Darby probes the profoundest depth of what humanity has thought about its condition - about signs, symbols, images, meanings, particularity and universalities, the evolution of thought and feelings over two or three millennia, and the dialectic of the irreconcilables: eternity and time, god and humankind, fact and meaning, science and religion, individualism and community.

He provides a provocative interpretation of the recent Western tradition of philosophy, placing Hegel's resolution of the meanings of time and eternity at the centre of his synthesis of thought and life. This paperback edition contains a new preface by the author.