Ontology and Dialectics: 1960-61 [Paperback]

Adornos lectures on ontology and dialectics from 196061 comprise his most sustained and systematic analysis of Heideggers philosophy. They also represent a continuation of a project that he shared with Walter Benjamin  to demolish Heidegger. Following the publication of the latters magnum opus?Being and Time, and long before his notorious endorsement of Nazism at Freiburg University, both Adorno and Benjamin had already rejected Heideggers fundamental ontology.

After his return to Germany from his exile in the United States, Adorno became Heideggers principal intellectual adversary, engaging more intensively with his work than with that of any other contemporary philosopher. Adorno regarded Heidegger as an extremely limited thinker and for that reason all the more dangerous. In these lectures, he highlights Heideggers increasing fixation with the concept of ontology to show that the doctrine of being can only truly be understood through a process of dialectical thinking. Rather than exploiting overt political denunciation, Adorno deftly highlights the connections between Heideggers philosophy and his political views and, in doing so, offers an alternative plea for enlightenment and rationality.

These seminal lectures, in which Adorno dissects the thought of one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers, will appeal to students and scholars in philosophy and critical theory and throughout the humanities and social sciences.

• Contents
• Editors Foreword
• LECTURE 1: What Being Really is
• Against the philosophy of standpoints and philosophical world views; the meaning of rigour in philosophy and the positive sciences? the plan of these lectures; immanent critique? What being really is; ontology as structul£™