This volume makes available in English for the first time Adorno’s
lectures on metaphysics. It provides a unique introduction not only
to metaphysics but also to Adorno’s own intellectual standpoint, as
developed in his major work Negative Dialectics.
Metaphysics for Adorno is defined by a central tension between
concepts and immediate facts. Adorno traces this dualism back to
Aristotle, whom he sees as the founder of metaphysics. In Aristotle
it appears as an unresolved tension between form and matter. This
basic split, in Adorno’s interpretation, runs right through the
history of metaphysics. Perhaps not surprisingly, Adorno finds this
tension resolved in the Hegelian dialectic.
Underlying this dualism is a further dichotomy, which Adorno
sees as essential to metaphysics: while it dissolves belief in
transcendental worlds by thought, at the same time it seeks to
rescue belief in a reality beyond the empirical, again by thought.
It is to this profound ambiguity, for Adorno, that the metaphysical
tradition owes its greatness.
The major part of these lectures, given by Adorno late in his
life, is devoted to a critical exposition of Aristotle’s thought,
focusing on its central ambiguities. In the last lectures, Adorno’s
attention switches to the question of the relevance of metaphysics
today, particularly after the Holocaust. He finds in ‘metaphysical
experiences’, which transcend rational discourse without lapsing
into irrationalism, a last precarious refuge of the humane truth to
which his own thought always aspired.
This volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in
Adorno’s work and will be a valuable text for students and scholars
of philosophy and social theory.
Table of Content
The Concept of Metaphysics.
1. What is Metaphysics?.
2. Doctrine of the First Cause.
3. History of the Concept.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
4. Plato, Aristotle and Heidegger.
5. Universal and Particular.
6. Genesis and Validity.
7. Mediation and the Happy Medium.
8. The Doctrine of Immutability.
9. Form and Matter.
10. The Problem of Mediation.
11. Movement, Change.
12. The Unmoved Mover.
13. Athens and Auschwitz.
14. The Liquidation of the Self.
15. Metaphysics and Materialism.
16. Consciousness of Negativity.
17. Dying Today.
18. Metaphysical Experience.
Editor’s Notes.
Editor’s Afterword.
Index.
About the author
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), was a prominent member of the Frankfurt School, and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century in the areas of social theory, philosophy, literary criticism and aesthetics.
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