German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Weber to Heidegger

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
PART I:
Frankfurt
	1. Weber: Rationalization, disenchantment and charisma
		Bureaucratization
		Loss of freedom
		Life in the iron cage
		Loss of meaning
		Disenchantment and loss of meaning
		Charisma and change
		Weber as transmitter of the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment
	2. Horkheimer and Adorno: The irrationality of reason
		The Marxist heritage
		What is critical theory?
		Traditional theory
		Critical theory
		Loss of meaning
		The rise and fall of objective reason
		The way we are now
		Two objections to the alleged meaninglessness of modernity
		Loss of freedom
		The culture industry
		How dated is Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry?
		The irrationality of enlightenment
		Is negation enough?
		The distorting effect of Marxism
		Max Weber’s self-deception
	3. Habermas: In defence of enlightenment
		Habermas’ response to his predecessors
		Good rationalization
		Discourse ethics
		Problems with discourse ethics
		Good rationalization and the lifeworld
		Bad rationalization: system
		Uncoupling
		Colonization
		Consequences of colonization
		The task
		Loss of meaning
		Loss of freedom
	4. Marcuse: Eros and utopia
		Diagnosis
		Advanced industrial society’s methods of selfpreservation
		Soul control: the media
		Further methods of soul control
		One-dimensionality
		Eros and Civilization: why Freud?
		What Freud says
		Freud’s mistakes
		Aggression, the death instinct, and the Nirvana principle
		Fantasy as the vision of a new world
		The content of fantasy
		Is Marcuse utopian in a pejorative sense?
		Closing the gap between here and there
		Kant, Schiller, and the aesthetic basis of a repression-free society
		The recovery of ‘polymorphous sexuality’
		Non-repressive sublimation
		The role of reason in utopia
		Non-repressive civilization and nature
		The conquest of death
		The lineaments of utopia
		Hedonism, and the meaning of life
PART II:
Freiburg
	5. Husserl: Phenomenology and the crisis of humanity
		What is phenomenology?
		The phenomenological method
		The results of phenomenology
		The lifeworld
		Why is phenomenology important?
		The ‘crisis of humanity’ and the ‘crisis of science’
		Combating irrationalism
		The ‘telos’ of Western history
		The wrong turning taken by Western science
		Why is scientism mistaken?
		How does phenomenology ‘solve’ the ‘crisis of
humanity’?
		Can the ontology of the lifeworld really ground a universal morality?
		Is Husserl’s diagnosis of the ‘crisis of humanity’ correct?
	6. Early Heidegger: Existential phenomenology
		Being and Time: the project
		Method
		Being-in
		World
		Being-with-others
		Affectedness and thrownness
		Digression on poetry
		Projection, understanding, and interpretation
		Assertion
		Truth
		Care
		Inauthenticity and the One
		Idle talk, ambiguity, and curiosity
		Falling
		Anxiety
		Death
		Conscience and guilt
		Resoluteness
		Temporality as the ontological meaning of care
		Temporality and historicality
		Heritage
	7. Gadamer: Truth versus method
		What is philosophical hermeneutics?
		Gadamer’s motivation
		The aestheticization of art
		Play as the clue to the ontology of the artwork
		Novels and paintings
		Romantic hermeneutics
		Gadamer’s critique of Romantic hermeneutics
		The hermeneutical circle
		Understanding is never final
		The rehabilitation of prejudice and the authority of tradition
		Text and tradition
		Fusion of horizons
		Fusion and ethical tradition
		Criticisms
		Self-refutation?
		The historical sense
		Does Gadamer confuse interpretation with reconstruction?
		Does Gadamer confuse ‘thrownness’ with ‘tradition’?
		Is Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy too conservative, incapable of criticizing oppressive ideologies?
	8. Arendt: The human condition
		The human condition
		Labour
		Work
		Difficulties in the work–labour distinction
		Difficulties in Arendt’s account of work
		World
		World as a precondition of individuality
		Action
		The political
		The fragility of human affairs
		The motive for action
		Authentic politics
		Arendt’s critique of modernity
		World alienation
		Modern science and world alienation
		Scepticism, Cartesian doubt, and world alienation
		Capitalism and world alienation
		Technology and world alienation
		The rise of ‘society’
		The way we are now
		What is wrong with the way we are?
		Loss of freedom
		Loss of meaning
		Gesellschaft versus Gemeinschaft
		Canovan’s interpretation
		Tradition
		Authority
		Our loss of tradition
		What is to be done?
		Arendt’s response to the ‘crisis in education’
		The irreparability of the ‘thread of tradition’
		Ethical tradition versus Hegelian tradition
	9. Later Heidegger: Re-enchantment
		Truth and the turning
		Metaphysics
		The historicizing of being
		Homelessness
		The violence of modern technology
		Loss of the gods
		Anxiety and death
		The turning
		The return of the gods
		Becoming capable of ‘the good death’
		Gentle technology
		The fourfold
		Poetry and enlightenment
		The ethics of dwelling
		Heidegger and Weber
Afterword
Bibliography
Index