Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Catherine Malabou, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour: this new generation of French philosophers is laying fresh claim to the human. Across a number of new strains of philosophy, they are rethinking humanity’s relationships: to “nature’ and "culture’, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and even to our own brains.

Christopher Watkin draws out both the promises and perils of these new philosophies. And he shows just how high the stakes are for our technologically advanced but socially atomised and ecologically vulnerable society.