Andrew Bowie

While people have a remarkable facility for understanding often hugely complex forms of communication and interaction in everyday cultural and social contexts, from the structures of symphonic works to what their partner means when they say “I don't understand Brahms”, philosophical analysis seeks to isolate one form of understanding as if it were the key to all others. In order to become language, noises and marks have to be in a manner in which non‐linguistic things are not. The essential divide in contemporary approaches to these concerning language and understanding lies between those, who think that a theory of meaning must also give us an account of the notion of truth without presupposing an understanding of truth, and those, like Heidegger, who think truth must in some way be presupposed. It is here that the hermeneutic tradition allows to consider one of the least adequately addressed issues in modern philosophy.

Adorno's essay “On Jazz” of 1936 sees jazz as a commodity in the culture industry and as merely a perverted form of symbolic revolt against social injustice. This assessment is often echoed in his later work referring to jazz. He consequently fails to respond to the detail of the dynamic and rapid development of jazz in the twentieth century. This failure can be seen as a result of some of his assumptions about philosophical approaches to music. Adorno's focus on “what jazz is really saying in social terms” is part of his aim to construct “social theory by dint of the explication of aesthetic right and wrong in the heart of the [musical] objects.” Aesthetic judgment is therefore given priority over attempts to understand the practice of jazz in relation to its social and political contexts. The significance of cultural forms like jazz as expressions of social tensions and resistance to oppression is thus neglected. At the same time, jazz's significance as a model of modern expressive sociality, which has played a role in resistance to oppression of Black Americans, can be productively analyzed using other aspects of Adorno's approach to modern music. Adorno himself, though, largely fails to do this.

"Gadamer’s Repercussions is a terrific collection of essays. While Gadamer is not the most precise of philosophers, he turns out, in this book at least, to be among the most generative. The essays prove that Gadamer’s idealizing of dialogue can actually be put in practice by careful attention to the frameworks he addresses. I was most impressed by the essays that situate his ethics, his aesthetics, his relation to romanticism, his understanding of the relation of law and morality, his engagements with Fascism, and several aspects of his vexed relationship with postmodern thinking, especially on the possibility of dialogue."—Charles Altieri, author of The Particulars of Rapture "Gadamer is well known for his insistence that every reading is a new reading and every act of understanding a pathway to new understanding. Krajewski’s carefully assembled volume applies these maxims to the understanding of Gadamer himself. By focusing on his intellectual and political background as well as his long-range influence and repercussions, the book opens new vistas for assessing one of the philosophical giants of the twentieth century."—Fred Dallmayr, author of Dialogue Among Civilizations.

The notion of the 'philosophy of x', which has recently tended to become part of many subjects, from music to management, tends to obscure a range of important issues. The idea behind it seems to be that, by designating one's reflections on a subject as the ‘philosophy’ of whatever it is one is reflecting about, one achieves some kind of higher insight. Such an approach arguably grants too much to a subject whose main manifestation is actually endless disagreement on fundamental issues. In the light of this less flattering view of philosophy I want to suggest that we may sometimes achieve more by thinking of some of our practices, particularly in the aesthetic domain, as manifestations of what philosophy might become, rather than just thinking of those practices as objects of philosophical analysis.

In the English-speaking world it is not clear that any of the later Schelling's critique of Hegel haseverdirectly been part of serious philosophical debate, though its indirect effects, via the work of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and others, are oftenunconsciouslypresent in contemporary debates. How this fact looks in terms of a Hegelian conception of the history of philosophy is a question that would require more space than I have here. What I want to suggest is that the confrontation with Hegel of the later Schelling, as well as some aspects of the earlier Schelling, open up conceptual issues which are present in contemporary philosophical reflections on modernity and post-modernity. This happens, however, in ways which have hardly become common currency in these reflections. The basis of my argument is the re-interpretation of Schelling's arguments by Manfred Frank.The main philosophical impetus behind the post-modern is the idea that the attempt to establish any essential identity between being and thinking, of which Hegel is usually seen as the classic representative, must be regarded as a metaphysical dream from which we must awaken, if we are not to miss the possibilities of the new time in which we are living. In this view the illusion of identity threatens to block our access to the diversity available if we realise that this illusion must be renounced. If it is true that the history of Western metaphysics consists in the attempt to articulate the presence of the infinite within the finite, then such arguments can be seen as making a certain degree of sense: once philosophy has achieved this articulation the consequence can seem to be a closure in which the new always reveals itself as ultimately the old.

The Anglophone reception of the work of T. W. Adorno has yet to succeed in making him a major part of mainstream philosophical debate. Among the reasons for this are the refusal of too many analytic philosophers to consider alternative approaches to philosophy, and Adorno's writing style, which does not always offer direct points of access for other philosophical traditions. Things are also not helped by the fact that writers on Adorno can tend to adopt some of his mode of writing, on the basis of the claim that Adorno's esoteric style is part of the content of his writing. However, Adorno's lectures on the topics of his major books are actually often remarkably lucid, offering ways of bringing him into almost any...

T. W. Adorno's philosophy of music aims to show that music is a source of important insights into the nature of modern society. This position leads, though, to a series of methodological difficulties, some of which can be alleviated by using resources from Heidegger's hermeneutics. The essay takes the key notion of `judgementless synthesis' from Adorno's unfinished book on Beethoven and connects it to Heidegger's account of pre-propositional under-standing and to Kant's notion of schematism. This connection is shown to have consequences for how we conceive of both the meaning of music and meaning in more general terms, especially with regard to analytical philosophy. The essay argues that, despite its many important insights, Adorno's account of the meaning of music in modernity depends too much on his analogy between Hegel's claim to achieve the final philosophy and Beethoven's establishment of new forms of integration for musical material

On the History of Modern Philosophy is a key transitional text in the history of European philosophy. In it, F. W. J. Schelling surveys philosophy from Descartes to German Idealism and shows why the Idealist project is ultimately doomed to failure. The lectures trace the path of philosophy from Descartes through Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, to Hegel and Schelling's own work. The extensive critiques of Hegel prefigure many of the arguments to be found in Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. This is the first English translation of On the History of Modern Philosophy. In his introduction Andrew Bowie sets the work in the context of Schelling's career and clarifies its philosophical issues. The translation will be of special interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, literary theorists, and theologians.

_Introduction to German Philosophy_ is the only book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the key ideas and arguments of modern German philosophy from Kant to the present. the first book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the key ideas and arguments of modern German philosophy from Kant to the present. offers an accessible introduction to the work, among others, of Kant, Fichte, the Romantics, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Gadamer, and Habermas. considers how German philosophy reacts to revolutionary changes in modern science, society, and culture; ideal for anyone wanting to know more about the role of the German tradition within philosophy and literature as a whole

Modern philosophers generally assume that music is a problem to which philosophy ought to offer an answer. Andrew Bowie’s Music, Philosophy, and Modernity suggests, in contrast, that music might offer ways of responding to some central questions in modern philosophy. Bowie looks at key philosophical approaches to music ranging from Kant, through the German Romantics and Wagner, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno. He uses music to re-examine many current ideas about language, subjectivity, metaphysics, truth, and ethics, and he suggests that music can show how the predominant images of language, communication, and meaning in contemporary philosophy may be lacking in essential ways. His book will be of interest to philosophers, musicologists, and all who are interested in the relation between music and philosophy