Following the general historical overview of Theodor W. Adorno's work offered in Part I, Part II focuses on its distinct philosophical dimensions. Contributors examine Adorno's philosophy under traditional rubrics: logic, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and aesthetics; moral, social and political philosophy, as well as the philosophy of culture and the philosophy of history. Their examination reveals that Adorno completely rethinks these traditional areas of philosophical enquiry in his relentless critique of damaged life under capitalism.

Alison Stone's essay serves as an excellent introduction to Adorno's decidedly non-traditional mode of thought. After describing Hegel's transformation of Kant's transcendental logic into a dialectical logic, Stone explains how Adorno turns Hegel's dialectics into a negative dialectics. Adorno makes use of dialectics, not to trace the development of concepts, but to explore social phenomena such as myth and enlightenment, and more broadly still, to grasp the historical relationship between nature and culture. Although nature and culture have been entwined throughout human history, negative dialectics reveals that our historically conditioned ideas about nature do not exhaust it: nature remains stubbornly non-identical with respect to all our conceptions of it. Stone's account of Adorno's dialectically inflected non-identity thinking issues in an analysis of his employment of constellations of concepts to apprehend objects that are at one and the same time bound up with concepts and fundamentally heterogeneous with respect to them.