A philosopher excavates the origins of our state of permanent crisis and charts a more promising path forward.
 
Crises abound—so many that it can be easy to lose perspective. In A Philosophy of Crisis, Miguel de Beistegui traces the intellectual development of ideas about crisis and identifies four distinct forms a crisis might take: crises of deviation, exception, contradiction, and extinction. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and ecocriticism), A Philosophy of Crisis offers new conceptual tools for both understanding and avoiding the dangers of our crisis-saturated time.

Miguel de Beistegui is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and honorary professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author of many books, most recently Thought under Threat: On Superstition, Spite, and Stupidity, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Introduction
1 Crisis: A Brief Critical History
2 Crises of Exception
3 Crises of Contradiction
4 Deconstructing Crisis?
5 Crises of Extinction, or Gaia in Peril
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index