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REFORM OF THE NATION'S PRIMARY SYSTEM OF CASH AID TO THE POOR IS AGAIN ON THE POLITICAL AGENDA. THE AUTHOR ASKS IF THE WELFARE PROGRAM REALLY NEEDS REFORM. THE AUTHOR THEN SHOWS HOW LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE NOTIONS OF REFORM DIFFER AND WHERE PAST REFORMS FAILED.

History, phenomenology, and moral analysis -- Abolishing torture and the uprising of the rule of law -- Introduction -- Abolishing torture: the dignity of tormentable bodies -- Torture and the rule of law: Beccaria -- The Beccaria thesis -- Forgetting Beccaria -- On being tortured -- Introduction -- Pain: certainty and separateness -- Amiry's torture -- Pain's aversiveness -- Pain: feeling or reason? -- Sovereignty: pain and the other -- Without borders: loss of trust in the world -- The harm of rape, the harm of torture -- Introduction: rape and/as torture -- Moral injury as appearance -- Moral injury as actual: bodily persons -- On being raped -- Exploiting the moral ontology of the body: rape -- Exploiting the moral ontology of the body: torture -- Constructing moral dignity -- To be is to live, to be is to be recognized -- Introduction -- To be is to be recognized -- Risk and the necessity of life for self-consciousness -- Being and having a body -- From life to recognition -- Trust as mutual recognition -- Introduction -- The necessity, pervasiveness, and invisibility of trust -- Trust's priority over reason -- Trust in a developmental setting -- On first love: trust as the recognition of intrinsic worth -- "My body ... my physical and metaphysical dignity" -- Why dignity? -- From Nuremberg to Treblinka: the fate of the unlovable -- Without rights, without dignity: from humiliation to devastation -- Dignity and the human form -- The body without dignity -- My body: voluntary and involuntary -- Bodily revolt: respect, self-respect, and dignity -- Concluding remarks : on moral alienation -- The abolition of torture and utilitarian fantasies -- Moral alienation and the persistence of rape.

Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. Critics have always complained about the lack of a practical, political or ethical dimension to Adorno's philosophy. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J. M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. Bernstein relates Adorno's ethics to major trends in contemporary moral philosophy. He analyses the full range of Adorno's major works, with a special focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics. In developing his account Bernstein lays particular stress on Adorno's contention that the event of Auschwitz demands a new categorical imperative. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and as such will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music

1. Critical theory : the very idea : reflections of nihilism and domination -- 2. Liberty and the ideal speech situation -- 3. Self-knowledge as praxis : narrative and narration in psychoanalysis -- 4. Moral norms and ethical identities : on the linguistification of the sacred -- 5. The generalized other, concrete others -- 6. The causality of fate : on modernity and modernism -- 7. Language, world-disclosure and judgment.

Presents a detailed reconstruction of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory which, although still a work-in-progress at the time of his death in 1969, is the most decisive work of 20th-century philosophical aesthetics. A discussion of philosophical aesthetics as a theory of reason is followed by an examination of the insignificance of aesthetics for traditional Marxism; positive & negative aspects of the autonomy of art; & the nature of rationalized reason. Special attention is given to Adorno's attempt to demonstrate that the practices of modern art implicitly promote conceptions of knowing, reasoning, & acting that differ from rationalized versions of the same that have become hegemonic in the world beyond art. Adorno's claim that each authentic work of art contains a truth-content in relation to such things as nature, society, ideology, or philosophy is addressed. However, since artworks perform rather than elaborate, Adorno felt artworks require philosophical elaboration It is maintained that the relation between art & philosophy in Adorno's aesthetic can be seen as "analogous to the relation between concept & intuition in Kantian philosophy.". J. Lindroth

Philosophical claims arguing from formal & substantive theses that the ethical can be construed through the traumatic insistence of the Holocaust are critiqued. In form, the structure or grammar of trauma parallels that of moral insight, so the two categories converge. In substance, the categories are related because the traumatic insistence of the Holocaust event provides the empirically verifiable actualization of the structure, or because the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust supports a constitutive fracturing within the subjectivity needed to satisfy the first moment of the grammar of the ethics. The development of these claims in Jean-Francois Lyotard's thought is traced, including his early interpretation of Emmanual Levinas, his generalization of the grammar of ethicality (The Differend, 1983) & his later recasting of the generalization via psychoanalysis in Heidegger and "the Jews" (1988). It is concluded that there are no grounds for identifying traumatic insistence with the ethical, even though they contain structural homologies, & traumatic insistence can be used as metaphor for ethical demands. M. Pflum

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1987) & the paintings of Chaim Soutine are analyzed to (1) demonstrate how aesthetics became connected with human embodiment & (2) indicate how the aesthetic-human embodiment relationship became the predominant component of modernist painting. After introducing the "amenability problem" within Kant's thought (defined as Kant's questioning of nature's suitability for human designs), his assertion that reflective judgment is needed to address amenability & to evaluate life is discussed, & Kant's contention is repudiated; it is maintained that the amenability problem can only be resolved within the context of making aesthetic reflective judgments of natural beauty. It is contended that Soutine's paintings of animal carnality & landscapes invoke the process of transcendental induction, & this process is viewed as answering Kant's amenability problem. J. W. Parker

Reviews and discusses the findings of an article which appeared in vol. 218, pp.102-27, on aspects of new theories about aesthetics.

Based on Jurgen Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, 1987 [1985]), an attempt is made to reconcile philosophical modernism's immanence & particularism to Habermas's transcendence & universalism through exploration of their respective truth claims. The roles of fallibilism, modernism, local reason, recognition, & communication are detailed. Ultimately, the work is faulted for its marginalization of the political -- the fate of politics & the public sphere -- which is seen as the philosophical discourse of modernity itself, & which comes into view through the operation of the causality of fate. J. White