Ranging over the works of many of the leading thinkers since Hegel (among them Kierkegaard, Husserl, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida) and treating issues (among them violence, responsibility, identity, alterity, the environment, and globalization) that have become increasingly urgent, The Step Back proposes a mode of addressing these issues that makes a decisive step forward across the "rough ground" on the way to a fresh understanding of the relations of the transcendental to the empirical and of the ontological to the ontic. The author suggests that the logic of these relations is well illustrated by the geometry of the Moebius strip, a ribbon that has two sides but only one surface.

A W. H. Auden of philosophy, David Wood's flashing, forensic sentences cut through the guises that conceal from ourselves our complacency even when--especially when--we take ourselves to be at our most ethically secure. Driven by a passionate sense of the seriousness of what is at stake, he writes nonetheless with an engaging sense of humour, with wit and with grace. This is the beautiful book he once said he hoped he would one day be able to write. But its beauty is not of the kind that isolates itself from our responsibilities. Its aesthetic is that of an ethics beyond ethics, an ethics for philosophy, but also for philosophy's other inseparable side.
John Llewelyn, University of Edinburgh