Against epistemology : a metacritique : studies in Husserl and the phenomenological antinomies
- Cambridge : Polity Press, 2013
- vii, 248 p. ; 23 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index. Translation from the German
This classic book by Theodor W. Adorno anticipates many of the themes that have since become common in contemporary philosophy: the critique of foundationalism, the illusions of idealism and the end of epistemology. It also foreshadows many of the key ideas that were developed by Adorno in his most important philosophical works, including Negative Dialectics. Against Epistemology is based on a manuscript Adorno originally wrote in Oxford in 1934-37 during his first years in exile and subsequently reworked in Frankfurt in 1955-56. The text was written as a critique of Husserlʹs phenomenology, but the critique of phenomenology is used as the occasion for a much broader critique of epistemology. Adorno described this as a ʹmetacritiqueʹ which blends together the analysis of Husserlʹs phenomenology as the most advanced instance of the decay of bourgeois idealism with an immanent critique of the tensions and contradictions internal to Husserlʹs thought. The result is a powerful text which remains one of the most devastating critiques of Husserlʹs work ever written and which heralded many of the ideas that have become commonplace in contemporary philosophy.
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Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938 Knowledge, Theory of Phenomenology History Aristotle Bourgeois Christianity Dialectic Empiricism Existentialism Fetishism German Idealism Cartesian meditations Formal, Transcendental Logic Logical Investigation Irrationalism Jugendstill Monad Noema Positivism Psychologism Relativism Solipsism