Aesthetic Theory
The culmination of a lifetime of aesthetic investigation, Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's major work, a defense of modernism that is paradoxical in its defense of illusion. In it, Adorno takes up the problem of art in a day when "it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying." In the course of his discussion, Adorno revisits such concepts as the sublime, the ugly, and the beautiful, demonstrating that concepts such as these are reservoirs of human experience. These experiences ultimately underlie aesthetics, for in Adorno's formulation "art is the sedimented history of human misery."
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- I'm sure you'll do some thinking on the philosophy of art front. To name a few recommendations: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) and Dewey's Art as Experience (1934).
> Art [as a creation] does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation [or nature, in a Spinozian meaning, which is but an eternal activity of creation], sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature. (John Berger, "The White Bird")
- Sure, I can clarify. By critically potent, I mean specifically philosophy that can serve as a value critique--"moralizing philosophy" if you will.
Wittgenstein's philosophical work is incredible and was fundamental to the discipline and to logic and mathematics, but his work is typically not value critique (excepting Culture and Value which is not considered important by most readers of his oeuvre).
Heidegger is, I suppose, another contender, but again, I don't consider the majority of his philosophy oriented around value critique (though his essays on technology do fit into this category and are excellent). Heidegger's thought, I find, is also less coherent, and he really stood by this image of the philosopher as "holier than thou" bearer of truths (this is actually touched upon in the article) which is an old model (actually, a mythic model concerned with power) that I think is impracticable. Not to mention, Sarte's conception and formulation of existentialism had a much greater general impact on human thought than Heidegger's, which, though in vogue for a while, has been mostly re-confined to the academy.
I'm not as familiar with Richard Rorty's work as I should be, so he may qualify. But Adorno has him beat on timing--Rorty's Bibliography doesn't start until '52 (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/rr/biblio_2007.html). Meanwhile, Horkheimer and Adorno had already published Dialectic of Enlightenment at that point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno_bibliography).
I am not familiar with David Stove or his works. So he may qualify. I'll certainly check him out later, however!
As for the works of Adorno's that are worth reading:
Negative Dialectics, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Aesthetic Theory, His works on Hegel. And there's more--those are the major works.
Your last sentence smacks of someone who has never even read a page of Adorno but rather has some generic, skewed conception of "critical theory" and thinks that's an adequate account of the thought of a philosopher (which, clearly being familiar with philosophers and the depth of their works, seems absurd that you'd adopt such a reductive and uninformed viewpoint on the matter). It's the equivalent to thinking Wittgenstein is reducible to a concern over "mere semantics" or Heidegger is reducible to, and dismissable on account of, his nazism. Rather presumptuous and rather close-minded.
- Here goes: Aesthetic Theory is a posthumous book by German philosopher Theodore Adorno and is one of the most important works on aesthetics in 20th century philosophy. In it, he combines elements from Kant, Hegel and Marx. From Kant's 1790 work, Critique of Judgement, he draws on the idea of the Sublime and the notion that art has formal autonomy (which Adorno modifies). From Hegel, he takes a dialectical understanding of the ultimate goal or aim of art, and from Marx he approaches art as being inseparable from society as a whole.
He shows how art has a semi-autonomous 'truth-content' (a la Kant), but one that is always the product and embodiment of unresolved contradictions within the larger social fabric. (a la Hegel, and more so Marx).
Returning to the NVidia article at the root of this thread, this passage pops out as problematic (certainly for Adorno, but also in general): "In our case, we use supervised machine learning, with a dataset of photographs pre-categorized as aesthetically pleasing or not." There is a real sense of question-begging going on here. And Adorno would say that this approach forecloses the very fact that the definitional boundaries of these categories are constantly shifting and lack any real social stability.
edit: links.... http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/aesthetic-theo... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/
- I think that's generally the case. In Aesthetic Theory (which is fairly inaccessible to the general public, probably best to read this[0] article instead) Adorno suggests that art mediums progressively annihilate each other as technology advances and the condition of possibility for an artwork is also the destruction of all previous works of art, both solidifying them in the history of art and also restructuring it entirely around the artwork itself, which contains all previous art historical ruptures inside it.
