Online research in philosophy

While T.W. Adorno is a lively figure on the contemporary cultural scene, his thought in many ways cuts across the grain of emerging postmodern orthodoxies. Although Adorno anticipated many post-structuralist critiques of the subject, philosophy, and intellectual practice, his work clashes with the postmodern celebration of media culture, attacks on modernism as obsolete and elitist, and the more affirmative attitude toward contemporary culture and society found in many, but not all, postmodern circles. Adorno is thus a highly (...) contradictory figure in the present constellation, anticipating some advanced tendencies of contemporary thought, while standing firming against other regnant intellectual attitudes and positions. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by "art." Stephen Zepke argues that art, in their account, is an ontological term and an ontological practice that results in a new understanding of aesthetics. For Deleuze and Guattari understanding what art "is" means understanding how it works, what it does, how it "becomes," and finally, how it lives. This book illuminates these philosophers' discussion of ontology from the viewpoint of art-and vice versa-in a thorough questioning (...) of aesthetic criteria as they are normally understood. (shrink)

I argue that Japanese noise could only become meaningful and articulate at a time when thought and language have become somehow inarticulate. I very briefly recount T.W. Adorno's controversial claims that we live in a wholly abstract and instrumental world, where each object we encounter holds meaning only as 1) a representative of the class to which it belongs and 2) a tool for our use. As is now the convention in Adorno scholarship and cultural studies generally, I (...) name ordering principles of such life identity thinking and the object of its inarticulacy the non-identical. Rather than devoting this paper to debating the veracity of these principles, once I unpack modern art's predicament within the confines of identity thinking I make a case for the utter sensibility of the prima facie senselessness of Japanese noise. But this ultimate sensibility of Japanese noise, I argue, exemplifies the crisis of all modern art: despite its efforts to frustrate sense and stall the prevailing cultural logic, it becomes sensible as a commodified cultural product. Japanese noise therefore provides a case study of the process by which a critique of a consumer culture becomes a commercial product of that culture, thereby neutralizing the critical power of the work. Within such structures the critical capacity of art in general is under threat. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that modernism in the arts might have in articulating the uselessness and incomprehensibility of physical and mental suffering. It is argued that the experience of illness is frequently resistant to interpretation, and as such, it will be suggested, to conventional forms of artistic expression and communication. Conventional narratives, and other beautiful or conventionally expressive aesthetic structures, that presuppose the possibility and desirability of an harmonious and meaningful resolution to conflicts and (...) tensions, may fundamentally misrepresent the patient
s experience. By drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas (on useless suffering) and the aesthetic theories of Nietzsche and T. W. Adorno, it will be argued first that a faith in the possibility of harmonious resolution of suffering is misplaced and does violence to the experience of suffering. Second, it will be argued that the expression of suffering lies not in finding words, images or sounds that communicate the experience of that suffering to others, but rather in the persistent and radical disruption of any illusion of meaning and coherence that might be imposed upon the experience, so that the very possibility of communication is also disrupted. (shrink)

The “Frankfurt School” refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction (...) and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995). (shrink)

G.W.F. Hegel's aesthetics, or philosophy of art, forms part of the extraordinarily rich German aesthetic tradition that stretches from J.J. Winckelmann's Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755) and G.E. Lessing's Laocoon (1766) through Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) to Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (1872) and (in the twentieth century) Martin Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art (...) (1935–6) and T.W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970). Hegel was influenced in particular by Winckelmann, Kant and Schiller, and his own thesis of the “end of art” (or what has been taken to be that thesis) has itself been the focus of close attention by Heidegger and Adorno. Hegel's philosophy of art is a wide ranging account of beauty in art, the historical development of art, and the individual arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. It contains distinctive and influential analyses of Egyptian art, Greek sculpture, and ancient and modern tragedy, and is regarded by many as one of the greatest aesthetic theories to have been produced since Aristotle's Poetics. (shrink)

Summary In this article the authors seek to broaden the scope of the methodological debates now underway in Germany between proponents of a critical theory of society — principally the late T. W. Adorno and J. Habermas — on the one side and proponents of an analytical theory of social science — principally Karl Popper and Hans Albert — on the other. An attempt is made to formulate and systematize some of the fundamental epistemological and methodological principles which are (...) basic to Habermas' philosophy of social science and to bring them into a critical confrontation with some of the relevant counter-positions which have today a wide currency in analytic circles. (shrink)

Offers a comprehensive historical overview of the field of aesthetics. Eighteen specially commissioned essays introduce and explore the contributions of those philosophers who have shaped the subject, from its origins in the work of the ancient Greeks to contemporary developments in the 21st Century. -/- The book reconstructs the history of aesthetics, clearly illustrating the most important attempts to address such crucial issues as the nature of aesthetic judgment, the status of art, and the place of the arts within society. (...) Ideal for undergraduate students, the book lays the necessary foundations for a complete and thorough understanding of this fascinating subject. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction \ 1. Plato, Robert Stecker \ 2. Aristotle, Angela Curran \ 3. Medieval Aesthetics, Gian Carlo Garfagnini \ 4. David Hume, Alan Goldman \ 5. Immanuel Kant, Elisabeth Schellekens \ 6. G.W.F. Hegel, Richard Eldridge \ 7. Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Scott Jenkins \ 8. Benedetto Croce and Robin Collingwood, Gary Kemp \ 9. Roger Fry and Clive Bell, Susan Feagin \ 10. John Dewey, Thomas Leddy \ 11. Martin Heidegger, Joseph Shieber \ 12. Walter Benjamin and T.W. Adorno, Gerhard Richter \ 13. Monroe Beardsley, Noël Carroll \14. Nelson Goodman, Alessandro Giovannelli \ 15. Richard A.Wollheim, Malcolm Budd \ 16. Arthur C. Danto, Sondra Bacharach \ 17. Kendall L. Walton, David Davies \ Some Contemporary Developments, Alessandro Giovannelli . (shrink)

Bloch, E. Discussing expressionism.--Lukács, G. Realism in the balance.--Brecht, B. Against Georg Lukács.--Benjamin, W. Conversations with Brecht.--Adorno, T. Letters to Walter Benjamin.--Benjamin, W. Reply.--Adorno, T. Reconciliation under duress.--Adorno, T. Commitment.--Jameson, F. Reflections in conclusion.