Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This thesis has two aims--to put the case for the centrality of ethical orientation in Adorno's work, and to offer a criticism of Adorno's philosophy. The first four chapters take the form of the interpretation and the last one of critique. The pattern of presentation is to expound Adorno's theory of negative dialectics, which concerns itself with the issue and the conditions of truth, theoretically, before suggesting that what is here expounded as the speculative movement of truth must be grasped as a practical ethical orientation. Only from the latter standpoint is the necessity of negative dialectics at all comprehensible, as a moral necessity. In the interim, chapter three, I deal with his social-psychology, which concerns the bourgeois individual within society as both the perpetuation of the system in nuce and the potential site of this ethical orientation