Gretel adorno
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Theodor W. Adorno
1. Biographical Sketch
Born on September 11, 1903 as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived in Frankfurt am Main for the first three decades of his life and the last two (Müller-Doohm 2005, Claussen 2008). He was the only child of Oscar Wiesengrund, a wealthy German wine merchant of assimilated Jewish background and Maria Calvelli-Adorno, a devout Catholic of Corsican descent. Maria was an accomplished singer and her sister, Agathe Calvelli-Adorno, who lived with the family, a talented singer and pianist: together they provided Adorno a comfortable, sheltered, and highly cultured childhood. As a young man he read Kant and later philosophers weekly with the family friend and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer. Adorno studied philosophy with the neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius in Frankfurt and music composition with Alban Berg in Vienna. He completed his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics in 1931, under the supervision of the left-wing socialist and Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and in close intellectual friendship with Walter Benjam
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| Western Philosophy Twentieth century | |
|---|---|
| Name: Theodor Adorno | |
| Birth: September 11, 1903 (Frankfurt, Germany) | |
| Death: August 6, 1969 (Visp, Switzerland) | |
| School/tradition: critical theory | |
| Main interests | |
| social theory, psychoanalysis, musicology, cultural studies | |
| Notable ideas | |
| The Culture Industry, the Authoritarian Personality, the negative dialectic, non-conformist conformist | |
| Influences | Influenced |
| Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Husserl | Jürgen Habermas |
Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German philosopher who wrote widely in the areas of sociology, social psychology, aesthetics, musicology, and literary criticism. He was a member of the Frankfurt School along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others. Similarly to other Western Marxists such as Georg Lukács, Adorno rejected a classical interpretation of Marxism as an economic determinist theory. He took issues of alienation and reification of early Marxist philosophy, and de
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Theodor Adorno studied music in Frankfurt with Bernhard Sekles and with Alban Berg in Vienna while also preparing his habilitation from the University of Frankfurt, where he later taught. In the mid-1920s he was a prolific music critic and ultimately served on the editorial committee of Musikblätter des Anbruch (1928-1931). He collaborated with Thomas Mann as his music advisor for the novel Doktor Faustus, whose hero was based on the composer Arnold Schoenberg.
In 1934, after Hitler seized power, Adorno fled Germany for Oxford, and from there emigrated to the United States, where he took a position with the Princeton Radio Project (1938-1941), after which he settled for a time in California. In 1949, he returned to Germany, where he became a professor at the University of Frankfurt, and served as the director of the Institut für Sozialforschung de Francfort (the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research). He taught at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, where he was a key figure in the philosophical and aesthetic debate over the renaissance of serialism. T
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