Alasdair Bowie
Biographic Data
| ID | 738552 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alasdair Bowie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alasdair |
| FAMILY NAME | Bowie |
| SIGNATURE | BOWIE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5316-4373 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Contemporary Significance of Early German Romantic Philosophy
Recent interest in early German Romantic philosophy can be linked to other approaches, such as that of John Dewey, which are critical of the dominant direction of modern philosophy. The Romantics rethink the relationship between philosophy and art as a way of questioning modern philosophy’s focus on epistemology and scepticism that leads to a lack of attention to the diverse other ways in which human beings make sense of things
Theodor W. Adorno: A Very Short Introduction
Adorno: A Very Short Introduction studies the life and work of German philosopher and cultural theorist Theodor Adorno. It explains his most important ideas, and the historical, cultural, and political context of his writings. Adorno sought to understand the pathologies of modern societies epitomised by the Holocaust through critical engagement with fundamental ideas in philosophy, and social and cultural theory. He explored how human rationality…
What Is Music, Anyway?
Definitions of music are contested, not least because the notion of definition itself is contested. Rather than define music, it can be more productive to trace how the use of the term has shifted historically. However, this approach may fail to explain why it matters whether something is music or not. Music itself can question the exclusive concentration on discursive understanding of the world. The reasons for this relate to differences between…
Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction
Andrew Bowie's book is the first introduction in English to present F W J Schelling as a major European philospher in his own right. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, surveys the whole of Schelling's philosophical career, lucidly reconstructing his key arguments, particularly those against Hegel, and relating them to contemporary philosophical discussion. Dr Bowie traces how central ideas and conceptual strategies in the work of philosoph…
Modern philosophy and the emergence of aesthetic theory: Kant
The importance attributed to aesthetic questions in recent philosophy becomes easier to grasp if one considers the reasons for the emergence of modern aesthetic theory. Immanuel Kant's main work on aesthetics, the 'third Critique', the Critique of Judgement (CJ), forms part of his response to unresolved questions which emerge from his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) and Critique of Practical Reason. Dieter Henrich regards the crux of Kant's epistem…
Reflections on the subject: Fichte, Hölderlin and Novalis
The conflicting image of the I is evident in three of the most notable explorations of the nature of the I in German Idealism and early Romanticism. Those of J.G.Fichte, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Novalis, and the questions they raise remain central even to contemporary philosophy. Fichte wishes to found philosophy upon the one 'condition' which must be absolute and immediately certain, which is therefore itself 'unconditioned'. Hölderlin poses the…
Nietzsche and the fate of Romantic thought
This chapter considers certain aspects of the anti-Idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer and Karl Marx and then focuses on Friedrich Nietzsche's own texts. Echoing Idealist and Romantic philosophy, Marx sees Greek art as based on mythology, which he characterises, in the manner of the later Schelling, as a collective 'unconsciously artistic processing of nature'. The Romantic conception can incorporate both the new autonomy which makes music into a gre…
Schleiermacher: Art and interpretation
F.D.E. Schleiermacher's essential move is to argue, while providing an account of self-consciousness which is still significant for the philosophy of mind, that these conditions depend on language, and that languages change with history. Instead of setting up definitive boundaries between art and non-art, Schleiermacher sees the possibility of transitions from one to the other in any sphere of activity. In the Aesthetics Schleiermacher distinguis…
German Idealism and early German Romanticism
The term Romanticism is notoriously vague, and it is important to see that the early Romantics, who, after all, themselves established the term, can be characterized in a way which distinguishes them from later German Romanticism. Both Idealism and Romanticism are aware, as was the younger Karl Marx that the revelation of the hollowness of theology does not lead to the disappearance of the needs which gave rise to it. The 'Oldest System Programme…
Conclusion
The reductionist assumptions that lead to the idea of folk psychology themselves involve serious methodological problems which are shown up by arguments from the aesthetic tradition. The ideas about the role and nature of self-consciousness from Immanuel Kant to the Romantics suggest that attempts to explicate subjectivity in the terms used to explain objective nature will themselves fall prey to the problems of reflection. Theodor W. Adorno is a…
Hegel: The beginning of aesthetic theory and the end of art
This chapter focuses on the significance of aesthetics in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's work. Hegel's work on aesthetics has two main aspects. On the one hand, he produced the most influential systematic aesthetics of the nineteenth century; on the other, he announced the 'end of art' as an expression of the 'absolute' in modernity. The problem in Hegel's aesthetic theory is basically that the truth of a work of art emerges most completely via …
Schelling: Art as the ‘organ of philosophy’
The essential idea of Schelling's Natur philosophieis that, in the same way as the I of self-consciousness is both active and try to reflect upon as an object, nature is both actively 'productive' and is made up of objective 'products'. Schelling attempts to address the identity of the processes of nature with the processes of thought in terms now more familiar from Freud. The System of Transcendental Idealism (STI), aims at a view of nature in w…
Music, language and literature
The divergent interpretations of the relationship between music and language in modernity are inseparable from the main divergences between philosophical conceptions of language. Music provides an ideal illustration of the need for the approach, precisely because, as Paul de Man shows, it helps us to ask vital questions about the nature of language in relation to metaphysics and aesthetics. Music is inextricably linked to the emergence both of ae…
Aesthetics and subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche
In 1796 a German politico-philosophical manifesto proclaims the 'highest act of reason' as an 'aesthetic act'. The ways in which this transformation relates to the development of some of the major directions in modern philosophy is the focus of this book. The book focuses on the main accounts of the human subject and on the conceptions of art and language which emerge within the Kantian and post-Kantian history of aesthetics. Immanuel Kant's main…
Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy
22 2 Contradiction as Truth-Content: Adorno and Kant 38 3 Immediacy and Mediation: Hegelian and Adornian Dialectics 54 4 Nature 75 5 Freedom 96 6 Aesthetics and Philosophy 135 Conclusion 175 Notes 189 References 198 Index 205
From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German literary theory
From Romanticism to Critical Theory explores the philosophical origins of literary theory via the tradition of German philosophy that began with the Romantic reaction to Kant. It traces the continuation of the Romantic tradition of Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher, in Heidegger's approaches to art and thruth, and in the Critical Theory of Benjamin and Adorno.Andrew Bowie argues, against many current assumptions, that the key aspect …
German philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
German philosophy remains the core of modern philosophy. This introduction discusses the idea that German philosophy forms one of the most revealing responses to the problems of modernity. Including many significant German philosophers, & other more neglected thinkers, he provides an insight into German philosophical traditions
Music, Philosophy, and Modernity
Modern philosophers generally assume that music is a problem to which philosophy ought to offer an answer. Andrew Bowie's Music, Philosophy, and Modernity suggests, in contrast, that music might offer ways of responding to some central questions in modern philosophy. Bowie looks at key philosophical approaches to music ranging from Kant, through the German Romantics and Wagner, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno. He uses music to re-examine ma…
The Cambridge Companion to Adorno
The great German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–69) was one of the main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. An accomplished musician, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art. Later he turned to the problem of the self-defeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. In this collection of essays, imbued with the most up-to-date research, a distinguishe…
Schleiermacher and Post-Metaphysical Thinking
Schleiermacher rarely features in the now widespread discussion of the relevance of the German Idealist and Romantic traditions for contemporary philosophy because he has mainly been regarded as a theologian and theorist of textual interpretation. This essay shows that his most important philosophical work, the Dialectic, involves many ideas concerning truth and language which are generally regarded as belonging to what Habermas terms ‘post-metap…
Aesthetics and subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche
This new, completely revised and re-written edition of aesthetics and subjectivity brings up to date the original book's account of the path of German philosophy from Kant, via Fichte and Holderlin, the early Romantis, Schelling, Hegel, Schleimacher, to Nietzsche, in view of recent historical research and contemporary arguments in philosophy and theory in the humanities. The original book helped make subjectivity, aesthetics, music and language a…
Schelling and Modern European Philosophy
Andrew Bowie's book is the first introduction in English to present F. W. J. Schelling as a major European philosopher in his own right. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, surveys the whole of Schelling's philosophical career, lucidly reconstructing his key arguments, particularly those against Hegel, and relating them to contemporary philosophical discussion. For anyone interested in German romanticism and the development of Continental p…
Philosophy of music: Aesthetics, 1750–2000
Philosophy of music
Adorno, Heidegger and the Meaning of Music
T. W. Adorno's philosophy of music aims to show that music is a source of important insights into the nature of modern society. This position leads, though, to a series of methodological difficulties, some of which can be alleviated by using resources from Heidegger's hermeneutics. The essay takes the key notion of `judgementless synthesis' from Adorno's unfinished book on Beethoven and connects it to Heidegger's account of pre-propositional unde…
Aesthetics and subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche
In 1796 a German politico-philosophical manifesto proclaims the 'highest act of reason' as an 'aesthetic act'. The ways in which this transformation relates to the development of some of the major directions in modern philosophy is the focus of this book. The book focuses on the main accounts of the human subject and on the conceptions of art and language which emerge within the Kantian and post-Kantian history of aesthetics. Immanuel Kant's main…
Growth and Democracy in Southeast Asia
The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings
Alexander Kluge: An Introduction
Aexander Kluge tends to be known in the English-speaking world only as the maker ofavant-garde films that often create not a little puzzlement among their viewers. The fact is, though, that he is considered by many in Germany to be both a major literary figure and a major theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. His relative obscurity elsewhere is perhaps best explained by the demands his work makes on its readers, though as I hope to s…
Manfred Frank, Was ist Neostrukturalismus? (Frankfurt am Main: (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984)
Manfred Frank, Was ist Neostrukturalismus? (Frankfurt am Main: (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984)
Alexander Kluge: An Introduction
Aexander Kluge tends to be known in the English-speaking world only as the maker ofavant-garde films that often create not a little puzzlement among their viewers. The fact is, though, that he is considered by many in Germany to be both a major literary figure and a major theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. His relative obscurity elsewhere is perhaps best explained by the demands his work makes on its readers, though as I hope to s…
The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings
The Actuality of Schelling's Hegel-Critique
In the English-speaking world it is not clear that any of the later Schelling's critique of Hegel has ever directly been part of serious philosophical debate, though its indirect effects, via the work of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and others, are often unconsciously present in contemporary debates. How this fact looks in terms of a Hegelian conception of the history of philosophy is a question that would require more space than I have here. What …
Crossing the Industrial Divide: State, Society, and the Politics of Economic Transformation in Malaysia
From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The philosophy of German literary theory
Growth and Democracy in Southeast Asia
Adorno, Heidegger and the Meaning of Music
T. W. Adorno's philosophy of music aims to show that music is a source of important insights into the nature of modern society. This position leads, though, to a series of methodological difficulties, some of which can be alleviated by using resources from Heidegger's hermeneutics. The essay takes the key notion of `judgementless synthesis' from Adorno's unfinished book on Beethoven and connects it to Heidegger's account of pre-propositional unde…
Philosophy of music: Aesthetics, 1750–2000
Philosophy of music
Schelling and Modern European Philosophy
Andrew Bowie's book is the first introduction in English to present F. W. J. Schelling as a major European philosopher in his own right. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, surveys the whole of Schelling's philosophical career, lucidly reconstructing his key arguments, particularly those against Hegel, and relating them to contemporary philosophical discussion. For anyone interested in German romanticism and the development of Continental p…
Aesthetics and subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche
This new, completely revised and re-written edition of aesthetics and subjectivity brings up to date the original book's account of the path of German philosophy from Kant, via Fichte and Holderlin, the early Romantis, Schelling, Hegel, Schleimacher, to Nietzsche, in view of recent historical research and contemporary arguments in philosophy and theory in the humanities. The original book helped make subjectivity, aesthetics, music and language a…
The Cambridge Companion to Adorno
The great German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–69) was one of the main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. An accomplished musician, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art. Later he turned to the problem of the self-defeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. In this collection of essays, imbued with the most up-to-date research, a distinguishe…
Schleiermacher and Post-Metaphysical Thinking
Schleiermacher rarely features in the now widespread discussion of the relevance of the German Idealist and Romantic traditions for contemporary philosophy because he has mainly been regarded as a theologian and theorist of textual interpretation. This essay shows that his most important philosophical work, the Dialectic, involves many ideas concerning truth and language which are generally regarded as belonging to what Habermas terms ‘post-metap…
Music, Philosophy, and Modernity
Modern philosophers generally assume that music is a problem to which philosophy ought to offer an answer. Andrew Bowie's Music, Philosophy, and Modernity suggests, in contrast, that music might offer ways of responding to some central questions in modern philosophy. Bowie looks at key philosophical approaches to music ranging from Kant, through the German Romantics and Wagner, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno. He uses music to re-examine ma…
German philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
German philosophy remains the core of modern philosophy. This introduction discusses the idea that German philosophy forms one of the most revealing responses to the problems of modernity. Including many significant German philosophers, & other more neglected thinkers, he provides an insight into German philosophical traditions
From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German literary theory
From Romanticism to Critical Theory explores the philosophical origins of literary theory via the tradition of German philosophy that began with the Romantic reaction to Kant. It traces the continuation of the Romantic tradition of Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher, in Heidegger's approaches to art and thruth, and in the Critical Theory of Benjamin and Adorno.Andrew Bowie argues, against many current assumptions, that the key aspect …
Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy
22 2 Contradiction as Truth-Content: Adorno and Kant 38 3 Immediacy and Mediation: Hegelian and Adornian Dialectics 54 4 Nature 75 5 Freedom 96 6 Aesthetics and Philosophy 135 Conclusion 175 Notes 189 References 198 Index 205
Modern philosophy and the emergence of aesthetic theory: Kant
The importance attributed to aesthetic questions in recent philosophy becomes easier to grasp if one considers the reasons for the emergence of modern aesthetic theory. Immanuel Kant's main work on aesthetics, the 'third Critique', the Critique of Judgement (CJ), forms part of his response to unresolved questions which emerge from his Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) and Critique of Practical Reason. Dieter Henrich regards the crux of Kant's epistem…
Reflections on the subject: Fichte, Hölderlin and Novalis
The conflicting image of the I is evident in three of the most notable explorations of the nature of the I in German Idealism and early Romanticism. Those of J.G.Fichte, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Novalis, and the questions they raise remain central even to contemporary philosophy. Fichte wishes to found philosophy upon the one 'condition' which must be absolute and immediately certain, which is therefore itself 'unconditioned'. Hölderlin poses the…
Nietzsche and the fate of Romantic thought
This chapter considers certain aspects of the anti-Idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer and Karl Marx and then focuses on Friedrich Nietzsche's own texts. Echoing Idealist and Romantic philosophy, Marx sees Greek art as based on mythology, which he characterises, in the manner of the later Schelling, as a collective 'unconsciously artistic processing of nature'. The Romantic conception can incorporate both the new autonomy which makes music into a gre…
Schleiermacher: Art and interpretation
F.D.E. Schleiermacher's essential move is to argue, while providing an account of self-consciousness which is still significant for the philosophy of mind, that these conditions depend on language, and that languages change with history. Instead of setting up definitive boundaries between art and non-art, Schleiermacher sees the possibility of transitions from one to the other in any sphere of activity. In the Aesthetics Schleiermacher distinguis…
German Idealism and early German Romanticism
The term Romanticism is notoriously vague, and it is important to see that the early Romantics, who, after all, themselves established the term, can be characterized in a way which distinguishes them from later German Romanticism. Both Idealism and Romanticism are aware, as was the younger Karl Marx that the revelation of the hollowness of theology does not lead to the disappearance of the needs which gave rise to it. The 'Oldest System Programme…
Conclusion
The reductionist assumptions that lead to the idea of folk psychology themselves involve serious methodological problems which are shown up by arguments from the aesthetic tradition. The ideas about the role and nature of self-consciousness from Immanuel Kant to the Romantics suggest that attempts to explicate subjectivity in the terms used to explain objective nature will themselves fall prey to the problems of reflection. Theodor W. Adorno is a…
Hegel: The beginning of aesthetic theory and the end of art
This chapter focuses on the significance of aesthetics in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's work. Hegel's work on aesthetics has two main aspects. On the one hand, he produced the most influential systematic aesthetics of the nineteenth century; on the other, he announced the 'end of art' as an expression of the 'absolute' in modernity. The problem in Hegel's aesthetic theory is basically that the truth of a work of art emerges most completely via …
Philosophy (26 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Aesthetics (18 works) · Art (16 works) · Hegelianism (11 works) · Literature (11 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (10 works) · Philosophy and Historical Thought (9 works) · German (8 works) · Modernity (8 works)