The Persistence of Modernity Paperback by Albrecht Wellmer

Product Details

• Publisher: The MIT Press (1993-10-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 276 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780262731096
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

Essays on Adorno's aesthetics, the nature of a postmodern ethics, and the persistence of modernity in the so-called postmodern age.

The Persistence of Modernity presents four essays by one of Germany's foremost philosophers that go to the heart of a number of contemporary issues: Adorno's aesthetics, the nature of a postmodern ethics, and the persistence of modernity in the so-called postmodern age. Albrecht Wellmer defends the general thesis that modernity contains its own critique and that what has been called postmodernism is in fact a further articulation of that critique. More specifically, his essays offer a reinterpretation of Adorno's aesthetics in the framework of a postutopian philosophy of communicative reason, an analysis of the postmodern critique of instrumental reason and its subject that becomes an argument for democratic pluralism and universalism, a discussion of the dialectics of modernism and postmodernism in the context of architecture and industrial design, and a dialogical ethics that is inspired by and yet takes issue with Habermas's discourse ethics.

About the Author

Albrecht Wellmer is Professor of Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin.