This guide brings together eighteen original interpretations of the modern philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche. The contributors succeed brilliantly in placing their figures within a rich historical, cultural, and philosophical context, noting some of the important ways in which their ideas and arguments were shaped by the intellectual currents of the time, and how they in turn shaped subsequent philosophical debate.

Steven M. Emmanuel is Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Wesleyan College. He is author of Kierkegaard & the Concept of Revelation (1996).