[FRA:] Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts

[Ralph Dumain]

I just learned of this book:

Deborah Cook (ed.), Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, Acumen, 2008, 
212pp., $24.00 (pbk), ISBN 9781844651207.
Reviewed by Lambert Zuidervaart,
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2008.12.09
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14825

"It begins with surveys of Adorno's thought and its genealogy written 
by the editor, Canadian philosopher Deborah Cook. The next four 
chapters, by British and Norwegian philosophers, are on Adorno's 
reflections concerning logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and moral 
philosophy -- arguably the canonical core of modern philosophy. The 
last five chapters, written by American, British, and Irish scholars 
in sociology, German studies, English literature, and philosophy, 
address Adorno's social philosophy, political philosophy, aesthetics, 
philosophy of culture, and philosophy of history. "

This looks really interesting.  I'll just point out one curious contribution:

It may surprise some readers that the next chapter is "Adorno and 
Logic" by Alison Stone. For, as Stone acknowledges, "Adorno has no 
logic in the sense of a theory of valid forms of argument and 
inference" (p. 47). Indeed, like Martin Heidegger, Adorno challenged 
what Dahlstrom has called the "logical prejudice" in much of Western 
philosophy.[1] Yet Adorno attempted to transform Hegel's dialectical 
logic into a "negative dialectic" obtaining "between concepts and 
objects" (p. 47). This attempt goes back to Kant's "transcendental 
logic," which identifies the "pure concepts of the understanding" -- 
the categories -- that necessarily structure any possible experience 
of objects.