Jay Bernstein (Professor of Philosophy, New School of Social Research, and author of The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno; and editor of a forthcoming Cambridge text on Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics).

Bernstein's talks explored the question of how contemporary philosophy and literature have responded to the Romantic challenge to Kant's aesthetics and to its rejection of his faith in reason over sensibility or imagination. Bernstein connected this theme with his own influential work on the modernist tendency to highlight the problems of alienation by stressing the dissonant aspects of nature and society. Bernstein also put Early Romantic texts into the political context of their role in the development of the radical German tradition that culminated, in the twentieth century, in the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other advocates of Critical Theory.

Nature, Art, and Politics after Kant / Colorado State University / Fort Collins, CO 80521 
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