Problems of Moral Philosophy E-Book

Theodor W. Adorno

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 508

Beschreibung

This volume makes Adorno's lectures on the problems of moral philosophy available for the first time to English-speaking readers. It is one of several volumes of Adorno's unpublished writings which are currently being published in Germany, and which will be published in translation by Polity. The book is organized around an account of Kant's moral theory, and introduces most of the central topics of Adorno's far more difficult work Negative Dialectics. He examines concepts such as the primacy of practical reason, the relation between freedom and experience, and the desubstantialization of moral thought. These and other concepts are discussed in an accessible and entertaining style which is very different from the rest of Adorno's published work. Problems of Moral Philosophy will be an important resource for scholars drawing on Adorno's thought, and its nature as a lecture course makes it a very useful and accessible introduction for students to Adorno's ideas about moral philosophy. It will be of great interest to those working in philosophy and in social and political thought.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

SERIES PAGE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

LECTURE ONE

NOTES

LECTURE TWO

NOTES

LECTURE THREE

NOTES

LECTURE FOUR

NOTES

LECTURE FIVE

NOTES

LECTURE SIX

NOTES

LECTURE SEVEN

NOTES

LECTURE EIGHT

NOTES

LECTURE NINE

NOTES

LECTURE TEN

NOTES

LECTURE ELEVEN

NOTES

TRANSCRIPT OF

LECTURE TWELVE

NOTES

LECTURE THIRTEEN

NOTES

LECTURE FOURTEEN

NOTES

LECTURE FIFTEEN

NOTES

LECTURE SIXTEEN

NOTES

LECTURE SEVENTEEN

NOTES

EDITOR'S NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

EDITOR'S AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

Index

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Adorno's writings published by Polity Press

The posthumous works

Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music

Introduction to Sociology

Problems of Moral Philosophy

Other works by Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940

Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2000

First published in Germany as Probleme der Moralphilosophie © Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996.

First published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Published with the assistance of Inter Nationes, Bonn.

Editorial office:

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:

Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0-7456-1941-X

ISBN 978-0-7456-9442-9 (epub)

ISBN 978-0-7456-9349-1 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

LECTURE ONE7 May 1963

Ladies and Gentlemen,

You have come in such large numbers to a course of lectures whose subject cannot be expected to exert an immediate attraction for young people that I have the feeling that I owe you something of an explanation and even an apology, and that I should warn you against excessive expectations. When you attend a course of lectures given by someone who has written a book on the good – or rather the bad – life,1 it is reasonable to assume that you – or many of you, at least – have come in the hope that these lectures will teach you something about the good life [das richtige Leben]. And that you will be able to learn something from these lectures that will be of direct benefit to you in your own lives, whether in private, or in public, in other words, in your existence as political beings. The question of the moral2 life is one that will be put, or so I hope, in the course of these lectures. The form it will take will be to enquire whether the good life is a genuine possibility in the present, or whether we shall have to make do with the claim I made in that book that ‘there can be no good life within the bad one.’3 An assertion, incidentally, that – as I discovered later – comes very close to one made by Nietzsche.4 But in these lectures I shall not be able to offer you anything resembling a practical guide to the good life. And you for your part would be wrong to expect anything like direct, immediate help for your own immediate problems, whether private or political – and the realm of politics is very closely connected to the sphere of morality. Moral philosophy is a theoretical discipline and as such must always be distinguished from the burning questions of the moral life. Kant, for example, insisted that it was not essential to have studied moral philosophy in order to be a decent or a good or a just human being.5 Or I may cite a more recent statement that occurs to me. I am thinking of Max Scheler's book on ethics, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik – a book diametrically opposed to that of Kant – where he distinguishes between ethics as an immediate – or what he terms a ‘lived’ – world view, of the kind expressed in epigrams, maxims and proverbs, and moral philosophy which has no direct connection with a lived reality.6 The problems I shall be discussing here and which belong in the general horizon of your philosophical education are quite definitely those of moral philosophy as a theoretical discipline. So if I am going to throw stones at your heads, if you will allow the expression, it will be better if I say so at the outset than for me to leave you under the illusion that I am distributing bread. And if the bread that you hope to receive fails to materialize, this may mean that the stones I have thrown will miss, or – and this is my real hope – they will not turn out to be too terribly hard. For the theorems that I shall lay before you will not be too rigorously scholastic.