University of Edinburgh
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1975
Greenwich Village, New York, United States of America
  •  7
    The Meaning of Ugliness, The Authority of Beauty
    In Lydia Goehr & Jonathan Gilmore (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, Wiley. 2021.
    In “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” Arthur Danto argues that there were two stages to the platonic critique of the arts: ephemeralization and takeover. Danto's philosophy of art sought a rescue by detaching art from the philosophy of art in a manner that would give back to the arts the very dangerousness that so alarmed Plato in the first instance. This chapter draws Danto's theory into conversation with Stanley Cavell's and T.W. Adorno's philosophies of modernism. Ugliness or terr…Read more
  •  13
    Concept and Object
    In Peter Eli Gordon (ed.), A companion to Adorno, Wiley. 2019.
    In the Preface to Negative Dialectics, Adorno states that the primary ambition of the book is to find a substitute for the “supra‐ordinated” concept and to “break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity.” For a book whose ambition is to renew the Marxist idea of critique, these are puzzling claims. The notions to be criticized are Kant's in The Critique of Pure Reason ; Adorno, from his earliest studies with Siegfried Kracauer, had taken Kant's theoretical philosophy as expressing the…Read more
  •  6
    6 Das Naturschöne
    In Anne Eusterschulte & Sebastian Tränkle (eds.), Theodor W. Adorno: Ästhetische Theorie, De Gruyter. pp. 73-88. 2021.
  •  29
    Walter Benjamin’s Passages (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 31 (4): 118-119. 1999.
  •  138
    Following the lead of Annette Baier, this essay argues that trust relations provide the ethical substance of everyday living. When A trusts B, A unreflectively allows B to approach sufficiently close so as to be able to harm A. In order for this to be possible, A practically presupposes that B perceives A as a person and will hence act accordingly. Trust relations are relations of mutual recognition in which we acknowledge our mutual standing and vulnerability with respect to one another. A robu…Read more
  •  7
    Without Sovereignty or Miracles: Reply to Birmingham
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24 (1): 21-31. 2010.
  •  73
    Without sovereignty or miracles: Reply to Birmingham
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24 (1): 21-31. 2010.
    Let me begin with a wisp of political history. According to the Earl of Clarendon, in 1639 the king’s “three kingdoms [were] flourishing in entire peace and universal plenty.”1 Yet by 1642 civil war had broken out, and in 1649 the king was beheaded. What had caused this breakdown of civil and political order, a breakdown that was not localized in England but, in fact, rife throughout Europe—1648 like 1848 was a year of revolutions? Clarendon himself is less than acute on the matter, opting gener…Read more
  •  3
    Walter Benjamin’s Passages (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 31 (4): 118-119. 1999.
  •  6
    Theories of Existence, by T. L. S. Sprigge
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 18 (2): 209-211. 1987.
  •  8
    The Cambridge Companion to Foucault
    Philosophical Books 36 (4): 258-260. 1995.
  •  79
    To Be Is to Live, To Be Is to Be Recognized
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 357-390. 2009.
  •  88
    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…Read more
  •  169
    Suffering injustice: Misrecognition as moral injury in critical theory
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (3). 2005.
    It is the persistence of social suffering in a world in which it could be eliminated that for Adorno is the source of the need for critical reflection, for philosophy. Philosophy continues and gains its cultural place because an as yet unbridgeable abyss separates the social potential for the relief of unnecessary human suffering and its emphatic continuance. Philosophy now is the culturally bound repository for the systematic acknowledgement and articulation of the meaning of the expanse of hum…Read more
  •  13
    To Be Is to Live, To Be Is to Be Recognized
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 357-390. 2009.
  •  49
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Readymades, Monochromes, Etc.:Nominalism and the Paradox of ModernismJ. M. Bernstein (bio)If Schopenhauer's thesis of art as an image of the world once over bears a kernel of truth, then it does so only insofar as this second world is composed out of elements that have been transposed out of the empirical world in accord with Jewish descriptions of the messianic order as an order just like the habitual order but changed in the slight…Read more
  •  162
    Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury
    University of Chicago Press. 2015.
    In this unflinching look at the experience of suffering and one of its greatest manifestations—torture—J.M. Bernstein critiques the repressions of traditional moral theory, showing that our morals are not immutable ideals but fragile constructions that depend on our experience of suffering itself. Morals, Bernstein argues, not only guide our conduct but also express the depth of mutual dependence that we share as vulnerable and injurable individuals. Beginning with the attempts to abolish tort…Read more
  •  4
    Richard Rorty's Philosophical Papers
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 23 (1): 76-83. 1992.
  •  34
    Re-Enchanting Nature
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 31 (3): 277-299. 2000.
  •  8
    Re-enchanting nature
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (3): 277-299. 2000.
    [This is a revised and expanded version of an article of the same name published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, October 2000: 31(3), 277–299.]
  •  10
    Promising and Civil Disobedience (Arendt’s Political Modernism)
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28 (1): 47-60. 2007.
  •  7
    Rights
    In Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris & Jacques Lezra (eds.), Thinking with Balibar: A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice, Fordham University Press. pp. 230-252. 2020.
  •  37
    Promising and Civil Disobedience (Arendt’s Political Modernism)
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28 (1): 47-60. 2007.
  •  6
    Marx and Philosophy: Three Studies
    Philosophical Books 28 (2): 81-83. 1987.
  •  31
    Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (review)
    Philosophical Review 110 (2): 275-278. 2001.
    Arguably, there is no gesture more typical to philosophy than its repudiation, the sense that philosophical endeavor is a symptom of the pathologies or dislocations of everyday life it seeks to remedy. Throughout the nineteenth century—in the writings of the German Romantics, Young Hegelians, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche—the repudiation of philosophy is a constant. Sometimes this repudiation takes a reflective form in which traditional philosophical claims are translated into another vocabul…Read more
  •  77
    Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy
    Philosophical Review 110 (2): 275-278. 2001.
    Arguably, there is no gesture more typical to philosophy than its repudiation, the sense that philosophical endeavor is a symptom of the pathologies or dislocations of everyday life it seeks to remedy. Throughout the nineteenth century—in the writings of the German Romantics, Young Hegelians, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche—the repudiation of philosophy is a constant. Sometimes this repudiation takes a reflective form in which traditional philosophical claims are translated into another vocabul…Read more
  •  43
    Deleuze's philosophy of cinema departs from the standard conception of modernist aesthetics that sees art withdrawing from representation in order to reflect upon the specificity of its medium. While ambitious and influential, Deleuze's attempt fails. Overdetermined by its own metaphysics, it forsakes the real importance of the movies. It is unable to explain how they function and why they matter. This essay pursues three lines of criticism: Deleuze cannot account for the aesthetic specificity o…Read more