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Philosophy for Non-Philosophers represents Althusser´s late engagement with the popularization, interrogation and dissemination of the possibilities of philosophical thinking, specifically in relation to the possibility of a philosophical and political practice.

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In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life, Louis Althusser penned Philosophy for Non-philosophers. Available here for the first time in English, Philosophy for Non-philosophers constitutes a rigorous and engaged attempt to address a wide reading public unfamiliar with Althusser´s project. As such, the work is a concentration of the most fundamental theses of Althusser´s own ideas, and presents a synthesis of his sprawling and disparate philosophical and political writings. Nowhere else does Althusser push the distinction between philosophy and other disciplines as far, or develop in such detail the concept of ´practice´.
Rather than a work of ´popular philosophy´, Philosophy for Non-philosophers is a continuation and conglomeration of Althusser´s thought; a thought whose radicality is still perceptible in those that have followed since. Philosophy for Non-philosophers thus provides a vivid encapsulation of Althusser´s seminal influence on the leading thinkers of today, including Ranciere, Badiou, Balibar, and Zizek.

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Acknowledgments
Introduction by Warren Montag
Note on the text by G.M. Goshgarian

Philosophy for Non-Philosophers
1. What Non-philosophers Say
2. Philosophy and Religion
The Big Detour
3. Abstraction
4. Technical Abstraction and Scientific Abstraction
5. Philosophical Abstraction
6. The Myth of the State of Nature
7. What is Practice?
8. The Practice of Production
9. Scientific Practice and Idealism
10. Scientific Practice and Materialism
11. Ideological Practice
12. The Ideological State Apparatuses
13. Political Practice
14. Psychoanalytic Practice
15. Artistic Practice
16. Philosophical Practice
17. Dominant Ideology and Philosophy
18. Philosophy as Theoretical Laboratory
19. Ideology and Philosophy
20. Philosophy and the Science of Class Struggle
21. A New Practice of Philosophy
22. The Dialectic: Laws or Theses?
Notes
Index

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This book presents us Louis Althusser at his very best. Written in a style that is genuinely accessible to the non-philosophers while still accumulating one brilliant insight after another for the specialists, this previously unpublished manuscript tackles some of the most fundamental questions of all times: What is philosophy? How did it first arise? What is its relation to religion, to science, and to politics? In what way is philosophy the class struggle in theory? Why does this struggle take the repeated form of a split between two practices of philosophy, one idealist and the other materialist? And how can we develop a new, aleatory understanding of materialism after Marx? Bruno Bosteels, Visiting Professor Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society Colum Professor Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA

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