Henry Pickford

This essay first contextualizes Adorno's essays in literary criticism in relation to his historico‐philosophical account of modern rationalization and late capitalism, his dialectical theory of culture, and his return to postwar Germany. It then presents the neo‐Marxist and formalist principles that inform his literary criticism, emphasizing the artwork's critical relationship to society, on the one hand, and the theory of aesthetic experience undergone by the artwork's recipient on the other. These principles are exemplified in selective readings of Adorno's essays on Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Hölderlin. The essay concludes by polemically juxtaposing Adorno's practice of literary criticism with that of neo‐Aristotelian “ethical criticism.”

Throughout his publications Adorno deploys the concept of ‘riddle-character’ [Rätselcharakter], attributing it to reality as well as to modernist artworks, and likening the activity of philosophy and interpretation to that of riddle-solving. This essay explores the epistemological characteristics of such ‘riddle-work’ in the non-aesthetic context by first interpreting his 1931 inaugural lecture “The Actuality of Philosophy” and distinguishing Adorno’s use of riddle from that of Walter Benjamin. The analysis is then deepened by drawing on thoughts about riddle-solving as a specific kind of cognitive activity by Cora Diamond. It is then argued that Adorno used at least two distinct modes of riddlework in his writings. The ‘disclosive-critical’ mode poses a riddle whose resolution shows that the conceptual framework in which the riddle-question was first posed is in fact flawed or nonsensical; thus this mode can be considered a radical form of immanent criticism. The ‘minimal utopian’ mode in contrast involves both the attitude of the person seeking to solve the riddle and the riddle-character as a determinable, drawing on relevant thoughts by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The essay concludes by suggesting that the cognitive virtues of ‘riddle-work’ make it a form of reasoning that avoids the drawbacks of Habermas-style procedural rationality on the one hand, and Rortystyle disclosure on the other.

Der Band geht zurück auf die Tagung „Der aufrechte Gang im windschiefen Kapitalismus“, die im Januar 2016 in Weimar stattgefunden hat. Ihr Ziel war es, unterschiedliche Traditionen zusammenzuführen, Modelle kritischen Denkens zu vergegenwärtigen und neue Perspektiven der Gesellschaftstheorie zu eröffnen. Die Beiträge widmen sich der Standortbestimmung kritischer Theorien. Sie reflektieren auf ihre Ursprünge, loten ihr zeitdiagnostisches Potential aus und dokumentieren ihren interdisziplinären Charakter. Der „aufrechte Gang“ im Denken bedeutet, sich von der Übermacht des Bestehenden nicht einschüchtern zu lassen, konformistischer Akzeptanz wie irrationaler Sinngebung zu widerstehen und die Möglichkeit des Neuen, die Utopie, wach zu halten.

This article lays the groundwork for a defense of rational intuitions by first arguing against a prevalent view according to which intuition is a distinctive psychological state, an “intellectual seeming” that p, that then constitutes evidence that p. An alternative account is then offered, according to which an intuition that p constitutes non-inferential a priori knowledge that p in virtue of the concepts exercised in judging that p. This account of rational intuition as the exercise of conceptual capacities in a priori judgment is then distinguished from the dogmatic, entitlement and reliabilist accounts of intuition’s justificatory force. The article concludes by considering three implications of the proposed view for the Experimental Philosophy movement.

_Critical Models_ combines into a single volume two of Adorno's most important postwar works -- _Interventions: Nine Critical Models_ and _Catchwords: Critical Models II_. Written after his return to Germany in 1949, the articles, essays, and radio talks included in this volume speak to the pressing political, cultural, and philosophical concerns of the postwar era. The pieces in _Critical Models_ reflect the intellectually provocative as well as the practical Adorno as he addresses such issues as the dangers of ideological conformity, the fragility of democracy, educational reform, the influence of television and radio, and the aftermath of fascism. This new edition includes an introduction by Lydia Goehr, a renowned scholar in philosophy, aesthetic theory, and musicology. Goehr illuminates Adorno's ideas as well as the intellectual, historical, and critical contexts that shaped his postwar thinking