Nicholas Joll

[The following is from the Introduction to the collection that houses the chapter.] The final chapter, which is by Alexander Pawlak and Nicholas Joll, is about Hitchhiker’s as satire. Actually – and rather to the point, given the business of this book – the argument is that Hitchhiker’s is philosophical satire. In making that argument, we draw parallels between Hitchhiker’s, on the one hand, and famous satires by Swift and Voltaire, on the other. Another topic we discuss is the relation between Hitchhiker’s and other, or more traditional, science fiction. The chapter contains material on the meaning of life as well.

[Adapted from the book's back-cover:] This is the ‘philosophy and. .’ book that really needed to be written – because it is about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For (to paraphrase the great man himself) Hitchhiker’s is not above a little philosophy in the same way that the sea is not above the sky. Moreover: this edited collection tries hard to combine accessibility – and some humour – with rigour. The book contains an introduction, nine chapters (all originally unpublished, save one that has been reworked for the volume), a glossary, and multiple indexes. Topics covered include the meaning of life (and ‘42’), vegetarianism, the ethics of entertainment, artificial intelligence, parallel universes, God, and philosophical method.

[First paragraph:] Part of the point of this article is to support the following claim by Adorno: “Rarely has anyone laid out a theory of philosophical clarity; instead, the concept of clarity has been used as though it were self-evident.” In fact, and again with Adorno, I shall argue for what I call the “loadedness thesis”: the thesis that philosophical conceptions of clarity are pervasively, and perhaps inevitably, philosophically partisan (section one). Yet I shall proceed to argue for a conception of clarity nonetheless (section two). Such clarity I take as “default clarity,” in that, while there could be reason to eschew it, the burden of proof lies on those who would. That thought is not Adornian. But I shall consider Adorno as an attempt to discharge that burden of proof (section three).

A critical notice of Fabian Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly. The following is from the article's conclusion. 'Freyenhagen shows that Adorno’s thought has some practical import, but not that it could not have more. He shows that Adorno’s normative judgements can be read so as to cohere with the idea that today we cannot know the good, but not that the latter idea is true. Thus, Freyenhagen partially solves the two problems that he set out to solve. To that extent he achieves his main aim, which was to liberate Adorno’s practical philosophy from those difficulties. However, Freyenhagen leaves an important part of Adorno’s practical philosophy, namely its pessimism, rather unsupported; and that leaves Freyenhagen’s treatment of the two problems undermotivated. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the book is impressive and very illuminating, partly because Freyenhagen’s Adorno scholarship is excellent. Moreover, and despite its breadth and complexity, for the most part the book achieves a level of clarity that is rare in work on Adorno.'

This paper provides a critical interpretation of the theme, point, and methodological status of Adorno’s so-called negative dialectic. The theme at issue, ‘non-identity’, comes in several varieties; and the point of Adorno’s dialectic, namely reconciliation, is multifaceted. Exploration of those topics shows that negative dialectic seques into substantive doctrines, including a version of transcendentalism and a claim about deformation. The peculiar methodological status of negative dialectic explains that adumbration. In the appraisive register, my principal contentions include these: Adorno’s transcendentalism makes some sense of the aforementioned deformation claim; and negative dialectic qua method avoids mystery and metaphysical excess.