Jay M. Bernstein is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His work is grounded in the conviction that philosophy interrogates the foundations of our life together—how we make sense of the world, how we succeed in doing so, and how we fail. For Bernstein, philosophy profiles the human condition as simultaneously upright and failing, knowing and blinded, world-making and suffering, flourishing and dying, and explores how these competing dimensions are bound together in morality, politics, art, and everyday life.
His areas of concentration include social and political philosophy, contemporary Continental thought, critical theory, aesthetics, modernism, German Idealism and Romanticism, Anglo-American philosophy, and pragmatism.
Bernstein is the author and editor of numerous influential works, including The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Polity, 1992), Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (Routledge, 1995), Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2002; editor), Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno’s Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford University Press, 2007), Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (Fordham University Press, 2018).
