Abstract
‘Can Philosophy Change the World? Critique, praxis, emancipation’ argues that much philosophy in the Continental tradition is concerned with giving a philosophical critique of the social practices of the modern world that aspires towards a notion of individual or societal emancipation. The texts are characterized by a strong historical self-consciousness that will not allow them to be read without reference to their context or our own. Once the human being has been located as a finite subject embedded in an ultimately contingent network of history, culture, and society, then one can begin to understand a feature common to many philosophers in the Continental tradition: the demand that things be otherwise.