ABSTRACT
Australian Andrew Benjamin (b. 1952) is one of relatively few philosophers from the English speaking world who have engaged with the continental tradition. He has published extensively on the work of Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva and Jean-François Lyotard. Andrew Benjamin belongs to an emerging group of contemporary thinkers who have pursued what might be termed an ‘aesthetic turn’ in philosophy, echoing the earlier ‘literary turn’. Here he recognizes the interdependency of philosophy and the visual arts, and architecture especially. ‘Philosophy can never be free of architecture.’ To this end he has engaged in a vigorous exploration of the interaction between these two traditionally quite distinct fields with a view not to denying the specificity of the individual disciplines, but rather to exploring how each may inform the other.
