University of Edinburgh
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1975
Greenwich Village, New York, United States of America
  • Tragedy
    In Richard Eldridge (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 71--94. 2009.
  •  22
    Art and Aesthetics After Adorno (edited book)
    with Claudia Brodsky, Anthony J. Cascardi, Thierry de Duve, Aleš Erjavec, Robert Kaufman, and Fred Rush
    Fordham University Press. 2022.
    Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has h…Read more
  •  1
    Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2002.
    This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein…Read more
  •  10
    Adorno and Ethics (edited book)
    with Martin Jay, Christina Gerhardt, Rob Kaufman, and Detlev Claussen
    Duke University Press. 2006.
    Because of his preoccupation with the formal aspects of music and literature, Theodor W. Adorno is often regarded as the most aesthetically oriented thinker of the Frankfurt School theorists. It is Adorno’s perceived commitment to aestheticism—the study of art for art’s sake and the study of art as a source of sensuous pleasure, rather than as a vehicle for culturally constructed morality or meaning—that many scholars have criticized as hostile to genuine, concrete, substantive political, social…Read more
  •  13
    The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
    with Frederick Neuhouser, Michael Quante, Ludwig Siep, Terry Pinkard, Daniel Brudney, Andreas Wildt, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Emmanuel Renault, Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch, Jean-Philippe Deranty, and Arto Laitinen
    Lexington Books. 2009.
    Edited by Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch & Christopher Zurn. This volume collects original, cutting-edge essays on the philosophy of recognition by international scholars eminent in the field. By considering the topic of recognition as addressed by both classical and contemporary authors, the volume explores the connections between historical and contemporary recognition research and makes substantive contributions to the further development of contemporary theories of recognition.
  •  38
    On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe
    with Magdalena Zolkos, Roy Ben-Shai, Thomas Brudholm, Arne Grøn, Dennis B. Klein, Kitty J. Millet, Joseph Rosen, Philipa Rothfield, Melanie Steiner Sherwood, Wolfgang Treitler, Aleksandra Ubertowska, Michael Ure, Anna Yeatman, and Markus Zisselsberger
    Lexington Books. 2011.
    This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness
  •  13
    Anthropocene Self-Consciousness: Response to “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto”
    Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 43 (1): 139-142. 2023.
    The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the s…Read more
  •  53
    Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2002.
    This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein…Read more
  •  92
    Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics
    Cambridge University Press. 2001.
    Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. Critics have always complained about the lack of a practical, political or ethical dimension to Adorno's philosophy. 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. Bernstein relates Adorno's ethics to major trends in contemporary moral philosophy. He analyses the …Read more
  •  7
    On the Dependency Structure of Self-Consciousness and the Ethical Constitution of Reason
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 42 (2): 283-314. 2021.
  •  5
    The Meaning of Ugliness, The Authority of Beauty
    In Jonathan Gilmore & Lydia Goehr (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, Wiley. 2022.
    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
  •  7
    Concept and Object
    In Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer & Max Pensky (eds.), A Companion to Adorno, Wiley. 2020.
    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
  •  1
    6 Das Naturschöne
    In Anne Eusterschulte & Sebastian Tränkle (eds.), Theodor W. Adorno: Ästhetische Theorie, De Gruyter. pp. 73-88. 2021.
  •  27
    Walter Benjamin’s Passages (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 31 (4): 118-119. 1999.
  •  129
    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
  •  63
    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
  •  6
    Without Sovereignty or Miracles: Reply to Birmingham
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24 (1): 21-31. 2010.
  •  3
    Walter Benjamin’s Passages (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 31 (4): 118-119. 1999.
  •  5
    Theories of Existence, by T. L. S. Sprigge
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 18 (2): 209-211. 1987.
  •  7
    The Cambridge Companion to Foucault
    Philosophical Books 36 (4): 258-260. 1995.
  •  77
    To Be Is to Live, To Be Is to Be Recognized
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 357-390. 2009.
  •  80
    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
  •  158
    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
  •  11
    To Be Is to Live, To Be Is to Be Recognized
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2): 357-390. 2009.
  •  44
    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
  •  150
    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