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Reading across the whole range of Habermas' work, this book traces the development of the theory of communicative reason from its inception to its defence against postmodernism. Bernstein's analyses are always problem centred and thematic rather than textual, making this a major contribution to the critical literature on Habermas.
Torture and rape are only rarely considered by moral philosophers—because they are so indisputably morally atrocious acts and because their specific mode of suffering cannot be accounted for by reigning moral theories. By making them pivotal to the understanding of morality in general, however, Jay Bernstein’s intention is to throw into question the dominant schools of modern moral philosophy and to attempt to restructure moral experience and understanding on the basis of the formations of suffering they make salient. Morals, Bernstein argues, emerge from the experience of moral injury, from the sufferings of the victims of moral harm. For us moderns, morality at its most urgent and insi...
This book provides the first account in any language of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings.
The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.
This 2002 volume offers translations of major works of classic and romantic German aesthetics.
Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers--Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno--and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics (its concepts of judgment, genius, and the sublime) to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies.
Lukács's Theory of the novel has long been a key work in the philosophy but not the sociology of literature. J. M. Bernstein shows that Theory of the Novel must be seen in conjunction with History and Class Consciousness as a major contribution to a Marxist hermeneutics. He ties the philosophy of Lukács to Kant, Hegel, and Marx and contends that the categories structuring the novel are the central concepts of Kant's philosophy and that, therefore, the novel is marked by the same antinomies that infect Kant's system. Bernstein offers a concise account of dialectical theory and a telling analysis of Western (Hegelian) Marxism. He concludes with a critique of contemporary literary and critical practices, practices which only reinforce the antimonies already present in the novel. --From cover.
The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.
The topics addressed by Richard J. Bernstein in his extensive and illuminating work span the stream of contemporary thought in several directions: ethics, politics, epistemology, philosophy of history, and social theory. In reflecting on them Bernstein has played an intermediary role between the most recognizable product of American philosophical tradition, i.e. Pragmatism, and such central trends in European 20th century thought as Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, and Hermeneutics. In this volume a host of prominent scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America pays tribute to Bernstein’s lifelong reflection on such present human problems as: the achievements and the...
Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno's powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno's aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response to recent developments in aesthetics and its contexts.