Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics

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Cambridge University Press, Jul 23, 2001 - Philosophy - 460 pages
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was the leading philosopher of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J.M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music.
 

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Contents

Introduction
1
1 Nihilism Disenchantment and the Problem of Externalism
4
2 A Grammar of Moral Insight a Logic of the Concept
21
3 Outline of the Argument
36
Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly
40
1 A Refuge for Goodness?
45
Ethical Life versus Moral Centralism
58
Disenchantment The Skepticism of Enlightened Reason
75
1 Modernity and the Philosophy of History
236
2 Idealism Naturalism and Particularity
241
3 The Metacritique of Freedom
250
Disenchanting Identity The Complex Concept
263
1 Conceptual Content
266
2 Communication versus Naming
275
Dependency All the Way Up
287
4 Is Living as a Material a Priori Predicate
301

1 Disenchantment Rationalism and Universalism
77
2 The Principle of Immanence
83
3 Enlightenment Depends on Myth
90
4 The Destruction of Knowledge
98
5 Destruction of Aura Destruction of Experience
111
6 The Destruction of Authority
121
7 Conclusion
133
The Instrumentality of Moral Reason
136
1 Axial Turn and Saving Urge
137
2 Authority and the Fact of Reason
144
How Pure Reason Overtook Empirical Knowing
151
4 The Utility of Testing Maxims
165
Of Urgency and Obligation
176
Mastered by Nature Abstraction Independence and the Simple Concept
188
2 From Instinctual Renunciation to Abstraction
199
3 Abstraction and Fuels in Themselves
205
The Constitutive Subject
212
The Simple Concept and Linguistic Determinacy
218
The Guilt Context of the Living
224
Interlude Three Versions of Modernity
235
5 Reflective Judgement as Intransitive Understanding
306
6 The Complex Concept as Moral Insight
320
7 The Complex Concept as Authority
325
Toward an Ethic of Nonidentity
330
2 Reasoning in Transitions
333
3 Negative Dialectic
343
4 Reactivating Material Inference
354
The Indexical Binding of Moral Norms
361
After Auschwitz
371
2 Auschwitz as Negative Theodicy
372
3 A new categorical imperative
384
The Fundamental Principle of Bourgeois Subjectivity
396
Ethical Modernism
415
2 Experience as Metaphysics
420
Possibility as Promise
429
4 Fugitive Experience Ethical Modernism
437
5 Conclusion
451
Index
457
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