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Owen Hulatt has written an exceptional book. As truth takes a beating at the hands of late capitalism, Theodor W. Adorno's assessment of the modern world and of truth becomes intimately relevant. There is a lot to recommend in this book, and it is a bold contribution to understanding Adorno.
Following Adorno, Hulatt suggests that there is a connection between epistemology and aesthetics (x), that the objects of both admit of being true. As he puts it, "art is itself a kind of knowledge" (xiii). Hulatt's strategy is to begin with epistemology and focus on the emergence of conceptuality (chapter 1). Following Adorno and Max Horkheimer's account in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Hulatt develops a novel reading of that text that argues that human conceptuality emerges as a response "to our pragmatic commitment to self-preservation and control of our environment" (27). The second chapter presents the notion of 'thin determination,' as a way in which human rationality develops and gets deformed by society. Hullat argues that "even though concepts are based on mere self-preservation, there are determining constraints at every social level that make conceptual arrays fall out as the same in each case" (71). 'Arrays' is Hulatt's term...