MCDOWELL AND HABERMAS IN A POST-TRADITIONAL WORLD

MCDOWELL AND HABERMAS IN A POST-TRADITIONAL WORLD

Abstract:

Bookman takes up the subject on the "fracture" introduced by modernity into the ethical substance of tradition by staging a confrontation between John McDowell, who seeks to defend a pre-modern concept of "second nature" by rejecting the stranglehold that modern scientific naturalism has on the concept of nature, and Jurgen Habermas, who embraces the cognitive potential of modernity to correct the blindness inherent in all tradition. Though McDowell is suspicious of formal moral universalisms such as Habermas's, and though Habermas accuses McDowell's moral realism of being only "weakly" cognitive and thus incapable of providing any principled way to adjudicate moral conflict, Bookman reads Habermas as providing a complementary perspective to McDowell's hermeneutical purposes.

Philosophy Today; 2005; Vol.49, Iss.5; Directions and Directives: A Snapshot of Current...