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Fathers and Sons
Philosophy and the Myth of Inheritance

Muhammad Taha Alam

Philosophy has long been told as a family romance: fathers and sons, masters and disciples, rebels overthrowing their teachers.
Plato against Aristotle, Kant against Fichte, Hegel against Marx—the lineage repeats, always male, always patrilineal. But what if this drama of patricide is not the truth, but a myth that conceals as much as it reveals?

In Fathers and Sons: Philosophy and the Myth of Inheritance, Muhammad Taha Alam uncovers the hidden continuities that run beneath philosophy’s most famous quarrels. Instead of murders, he finds metamorphoses; instead of ruptures, inheritances disguised as rebellion. Aristotle carries Plato inside him, Fichte radicalizes Kant, Marx translates Hegel into the language of industry.

Yet the book goes further. It exposes how this myth of lineage has excluded women, queer thinkers, and outsiders from philosophy’s story. Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch, Michel Foucault - their contributions are remembered as appendices to men, when in truth they represent a different inheritance altogether. Queer disavowal, feminist transformation, postcolonial voices - these are not interruptions but fertile reimaginings of philosophy itself.

Provocative and illuminating, this book challenges the myth of patricide and opens a more plural vision of philosophy - where lineage is tangled, where voices outside the family romance become central, and where thinking is not an act of killing but of renewal.