Philosophy and Politics of Aesthetic Experience

Nathan Ross is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma City University. His first book, On Mechanism in Hegel's Social and Political Philosophy, was published in 2008. He has published essays in Philosophy Today, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, and Epoché, and an edited volume on the aesthetic philosophies of Benjamin and Adorno.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Aesthetic Semblance and Play as Responses to the Disfigurement of Human Social Existence in Schiller’s Aesthetic Education.- 3. Aesthetic Experience at the Limits of Thought in Hölderlin’s New Letters on Aesthetic Education.- 4. The Endless Pursuit of Universal Sense in Friedrich Schlegel’s Political and Aesthetic Thought.- 5. Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of Critical Experience—From the Romantic Artwork to the Disillusioning of Mimesis.- 6. Aesthetic Truth as the Mimesis of False Consciousness in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.- 7. Conclusion: The Benjamin–Adorno Debate on the Nature of Aesthetic Experience.