Adorno and Foucault's Philosophical Encounters with Modernity: Designing Inter-Discursive Models

The current study investigates the concept of modernity in Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault’s opuses and emphasizes that each of these philosophers has his specific conceptions of modernity. Therefore, after defining continental philosophy as a “discourse”, and explaining the problems of investigation, we will study this concept separately for Adorno and Foucault. Finally, as comparison and conclusion, we will design ontological, epistemological and paradigmatic models for these philosophers and present them here for the first time. As it will be shown, the fundamental elements that construct ontology and epistemology of modern human are, for Adorno, totality and identity, and for Foucault, bio-power and finitude. The heterogeneity of one discourse’s constituting elements will perfectly appear in paradigmatic models; based on the levels of knowledge, we will show while Adorno has “direct” philosophical and paradigmatic encounters with modernity and his theoretical encounter is an “indirect” one, Foucault has “indirect” philosophical and paradigmatic encounters and “directly” enters to the reality from theory, i.e. from the most concrete level of knowledge.