Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Art, dialogue, and historical knowledge: Appropriating Kant's Critique of Judgment
- 2 Beyond the third Critique: Epistemological skepticism and aesthetic consciousness
- 3 Overcoming the problems of modern philosophy: Art, truth, and the turn to ontology
- 4 History, reflection, and self-determination: Critiquing the Enlightenment and Hegel
- 5 Schleiermacher's critical theory of interpretation
- 6 Normativity, critique, and reflection: The hermeneutic legacy of German Idealism
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index
3 - Overcoming the problems of modern philosophy: Art, truth, and the turn to ontology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Art, dialogue, and historical knowledge: Appropriating Kant's Critique of Judgment
- 2 Beyond the third Critique: Epistemological skepticism and aesthetic consciousness
- 3 Overcoming the problems of modern philosophy: Art, truth, and the turn to ontology
- 4 History, reflection, and self-determination: Critiquing the Enlightenment and Hegel
- 5 Schleiermacher's critical theory of interpretation
- 6 Normativity, critique, and reflection: The hermeneutic legacy of German Idealism
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index
Summary
Gadamer's discussion of modern aesthetics is committed to a phenomenological notion of criticism. Criticism, in this interpretation, not only involves the negative task of demonstrating the internal tensions of a given position, but also comprises the mapping-out of a new and more adequate comprehension of the problem at stake. Along similar lines, Gadamer's critique of aesthetic consciousness and the skepticism that, in his view, pervades modern philosophy leads to the articulation of an alternative account of truth, one that is comprehensive enough to take into consideration the hermeneutic happening in the encounter with the eminent works of the tradition. However, if his hermeneutic account of truth develops dialectically from his critique of Kant and aesthetic consciousness, then a number of questions emerge. First, to what extent do the problems with Gadamer's critique of aesthetic consciousness – his failure to take seriously the romantic response to art in modernity and his over-generalization of aesthetic consciousness – shape his attempt to carve out a notion of truth that comprises the experience of art? Second, to what extent does Gadamer, in working out a hermeneutically adequate conception of the relationship between art, truth, and reason, manage to overcome the problems of aesthetic consciousness – i.e., the problem of its subjectivism, and its turn towards immediacy and pure, aesthetic presence? And, finally, to what degree does his own hermeneutic idea of truth and rationality incorporate the dialogical structure that he endorses in his analysis of the Critique of Judgment?
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- Information
- Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism , pp. 81 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009