The Actuality of Philosophy Thought Over Once Again

While the title of this article in part echoes that of Theodor Adorno's inaugural address at the University of Frankfurt in 1931, the article itself carries more echoes of G. W. F. Hegel than of a thinker who was one of his most able critics and penetrating expositors. In the end, however, my position is closer to that of Adorno and, indeed, William James and John Dewey than Hegel: "If, with the disintegration of all security within great philosophy, experiment makes its entry … that does not appear to be condemnable. … For the mind is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely...