•  1
    Guilt and Mourning
    In Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer & Max Pensky (eds.), A Companion to Adorno, Wiley. 2020.
    Walter Benjamin's influence on Theodor Adorno centers on the former's early philosophy of language, which drew on manifold sources, including importantly the theological writings of Johann Georg Hamann. Adorno adapts this “expressivist” philosophy of language as part of a critique of Hegel's dialectic that forms the basis for Adorno's understanding of epistemology and social criticism. The result of this tempered influence is that Benjamin's and Adorno's projects share a great deal of common gro…Read more
  •  1
    This book explores the nature of meaning, primarily through readings of the work of Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Alexander Stern offers a critical analysis of Benjamin's philosophy of language, finding in it a common root with Wittgenstein's thought on language, and traces the historical foundation of both accounts of meaning to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy. Benjamin's theory of language is notoriously dense and obscure. In elucidating it, Stern emphasizes Ben…Read more
  •  19
    “The familiar face of a word”: W ittgenstein and B enjamin on the experience of meaning
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 1297-1311. 2018.
    In what is now called Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment (formerly Part II of the Philosophical Investigations), Wittgenstein writes that the importance of the concept of aspect‐seeing “lies in the connection between the concepts of seeing an aspect and of experiencing the meaning of a word.” Wittgenstein claims that just as we can imagine someone who does not experience shifts between two aspects in the same image—for example, the duck–rabbit—we can imagine people who use language but do not e…Read more
  •  30
    This paper is a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, especially as it expressed in 1916's “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. I read Benjamin's theory as a contribution to what Charles Taylor has called the “expressivist” tradition that includes eighteenth century thinkers like J.G. Herder and J.G. Hamann. Hamann's work and his interpretation of the theological concept of condescension are of particular importance. Although Benjamin's views are often regarded as…Read more