In the Beginning Is Philosophy: On Desire and the Good (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781433133688)

Brayton Polka is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Senior Scholar at York University in Toronto. He is the author of a number of books and many smaller studies in which he examines the emergence, in the early modern period, of the values that constitute modernity and their development through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the issue of hermeneutics - of what it means to interpret a text - this books include studies of Shakespeare, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Wagner (his operas), Nietzsche, and Freud.