About

Henry Pickford is a faculty member at Duke University with expertise in philosophy, particularly focusing on European intellectual history, aesthetics, and critical theory. His work includes translations, analyses, and critical models related to prominent thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, and Kant. Pickford has contributed to the understanding of art, emotion, and expression, as well as engaging with philosophical analyses of Holocaust art and the influence of literary figures like Tolstoy and Kleist. His research often explores the intersections of philosophy, literature, and cultural history, emphasizing disclosive critique, rational activity, and the role of reason in societal contexts. He has authored and edited numerous publications, including books and essays, that advance discussions in these areas and participate in major intellectual controversies.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Art
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Computer Science
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Art history
• Linguistics
• Psychoanalysis

Selected publications

• Thinking with Cormac McCarthy

  Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy · 2024-06-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This brief essay honor the recently deceased American author Cormac McCarthy by interpreting a short scene from one of his screenplays as a modern instance of genuinely tragic understanding. This interpretation is compared on the one hand with a related yet comedic version of tragic knowledge, and on the other hand with the play "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles. The essay argues that fostering the presentiment of such tragic understanding might be a an effective way of motivating people to act to avert climate change.

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• Adorno and the categories of resistance

  Constellations · 2023-01-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Life, Logic, Style

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy

  While readers have long recognized the innovative styles of Wittgenstein’s writings, this chapter considers the philosophical significance of the concept, perception, and attribution of style in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and other works. Contrary to some interpreters, I argue in the first section that the later Wittgenstein continued to see philosophy as logic, but expanded his conception of what constituted “the logical” to include “forms of life,” “life,” “living,” and so on. In the second section, I draw on recent work on the logical form of judgment about living organisms to describe distinctive logical features of such judgment including necessity, unity, generality and its relation to particularity, and temporality, and in the third section, I show that this logical form and its distinctive features can elucidate claims made about forms of life in Philosophical Investigations. In the final section, I show how Wittgenstein’s concept of style exhibits the same logical features and thereby serves as a guiding metaphor for recognizing “the logical” in our everyday life-activities.

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• Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2021-12-31 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In this highly original interdisciplinary study incorporating close readings of literary texts and philosophical argumentation, Henry W. Pickford develops a theory of meaning and expression in art intended to counter the meaning skepticism most commonly associated with the theories of Jacques Derrida. Pickford arrives at his theory by drawing on the writings of Wittgenstein to develop and modify the insights of Tolstoy’s philosophy of art. Pickford shows how Tolstoy’s encounter with Schopenhauer’s thought on the one hand provided support for his ethical views but on the other hand presented a problem, exemplified in the case of music, for his aesthetic theory, a problem that Tolstoy did not successfully resolve. Wittgenstein’s critical appreciation of Tolstoy’s thinking, however, not only recovers its viability but also constructs a formidable position within contemporary debates concerning theories of emotion, ethics, and aesthetic expression

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• Knock Knock

  Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy · 2021-12-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• “Teaching of Life”: Tolstoy’s Moral-Philosophical Aesthetics

  2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Recognizing "the party of humankind": Käte Hamburger on Mitleid

  MLN · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Recognizing "the party of humankind":Käte Hamburger on Mitleid Henry W. Pickford (bio) In her final book, the lean and crisp 1985 study Das Mitleid, Käte Hamburger draws on the history of philosophical accounts of Mitleid as well as its appearance in modern literary works to ultimately present her own analysis of the concept. At the outset she notes that the concept has different connotations in different languages, including Greek ἒλεος, Latin misericordia, French pitié, and English pity and compassion; some thinkers have extended the range of the concept's extension to include empathy and sympathy; I shall simply retain the term Mitleid in my remarks here. Hamburger herself defines Mitleid as "die Teilnahme am Mißgeschick anderer" (7, 10, 12, 96, 100, 104, and passim). That is, she understands Mitleid as a two-place relation between one person (the subject) and another person (the object); at places she seems to allow the possibility of the object of Mitleid being a group of people, a complication that I ignore here. My paper falls into three parts. In the first part, I present one central line of reasoning in her book that leads to her controversial conclusion that Mitleid stands in no necessary, essential or constitutive relation to ethics. In the second part I show that, from her own analysis, an alternative picture of the general relation underlying Mitleid can be reconstructed that does have ethical purport; this general relation I call "anthropological solidarity." In the third part I argue that her [End Page 660] understanding of the relation between mental states on the one hand, and action on the other derives from a mistaken interpretation of Wittgenstein. Her misreading of Wittgenstein motivates her central line of reasoning, and can be corrected by a reconsideration of her chosen Wittgenstein passage that further illuminates my proposed alternative account of anthropological solidarity. My paper thus, all too swiftly and schematically, can be considered a modest immanent critique of Hamburger's account that thereby reveals an alternative picture of the general relation underlying Mitleid that does have ethical purport. I In the concluding section of her study Hamburger draws the consequence that Mitleid occupies an "ethically neutral place." Its ethically neutral status derives from the fact that, as an emotion, it can exhibit a positive or negative valence, as attested in the theories of Mitleid that Hamburger had canvassed in earlier sections of her book. According to advocates like Rousseau and Schopenhauer, for instance, Mitleid can motivate benevolent action by a subject towards someone in distress. On the other hand, detractors such as Aquinas, Spinoza, and Kant argue that Mitleid is neither necessary nor sufficient for benevolent or merciful (barmherzig) action.1 It is not necessary because rationally recognized moral duty alone may move one to benevolence (124); and it is not sufficient because as an emotional response, Mitleid does not of itself indicate what action should be pursued: reason is required (45–52). For these reasons, then, Hamburger seems to accord Mitleid no ethical significance per se, it can "bear both extreme positivity and extreme negativity" in judgements about it (95). Hamburger sets herself the task of investigating the structure of Mitleid such that it can explain how the concept can designate such a discrepancy in behaviors and judgments. She identifies the decisive feature in "the element of the impersonal [das Moment des Unpersönlichen]" or the moment of distance within the distinctive subject-object relationship of Mitleid. She contrasts Mitleid with justice (Gerechtigkeit), in which the other is merely an instance of a general object in the relation and the subject's psychological constitution is irrelevant.2 Rather [End Page 661] the relation of Mitleid for Hamburger necessarily is psychological-emotional, and both subject and object are determined more concretely and individually than in the relation of justice.3 However, although concrete and individual, the subject-object relation of Mitleid is not personal, but rather is more distanced than relations that constitute concern (Kummer) and care (Sorge), which Hamburger holds attend to personal relationships of friendship and love. Hence she concludes that Mitleid is "an affect, that is characterized by the quality of the impersonal."4 For Hamburger then, the distinctive...

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• Adorno and Literary Criticism

  2020-01-22 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69)

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Philosophy
  • Art history

  Contrary to earlier scholarship and in light of posthumously published work, Adorno (and fellow members of the Institute for Social Research) did not abandon Marx and Marxism, but rather understood Critical Theory as a continuation of Marx’s critique of political economy. This entry explores two targets of this continued critique: political economy first as the contemporary socio-economic reality, and second as the theoretical discourse describing and justifying that reality. In the first case Adorno theorized the transformation of “free market” liberal capitalism into “monopoly,” “state” or “administered” late capitalism, especially its ideological manifestation as the culture industry. In the second case Adorno deepened Marx’s immanent critique of central concepts at work in capitalism to expose the very forms of judgment that enable abstract equivalence and exchange of non-identical particulars. The entry thus argues that Adorno’s philosophical critique of epistemology develops his Marxian commitments.

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• 4. The Aesthetic-Historical Imaginary:

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-11-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Tyler Hildebrand

  Dalhousie University

  15 shared

• Robert Hanna

  15 shared

• Addison Ellis

  American University in Cairo

  15 shared

• Andrew Chapman

  Australian College of Applied Psychology

  11 shared

• Andrew Chapman

  Kyushu University

  4 shared

• Josef Fürnkäs

  1 shared

• Christoph Menke

  Carl Zeiss (Germany)

  1 shared

• Theodor W. Adorno

  1 shared