ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea of truth in Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Focusing on the book’s concluding “Meditations on Metaphysics,” I show that a dialectic between history and transcendence is central to Adorno’s attempt to articulate a defensible idea of truth, despite and amid the collapse of metaphysics. I conclude by demonstrating an unavoidable tension between the idea Adorno has articulated and what a viable conception of propositional truth would require. Although his idea of truth rightly emphasizes the nexus of social hope and social critique, he cannot account for the predicative self-disclosure on which discursive criticism depends.
