Habermasian Reflections

The practices of theorists: Habermas and Foucault as public intellectuals

2011-06-29T20:12:00.000+10:00

The practices of theorists: Habermas and Foucault as public intellectuals
Thomas Biebricher
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Thomas.Biebricher@normativeorders.net
Abstract

The scholarly works of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault have been subject to ongoing scrutiny for a number of decades. However, less attention has been given to their activities as public intellectuals and the relation between these and their philosophical and theoretical projects. Drawing on their own conceptualization of the role of the intellectual, the article aims to illuminate these issues by examining Habermas’ advocacy of a ‘Core Europe’ and his defense of NATO bombardments in Kosovo in 1999 as well as Foucault’s involvement with the Groupe d’Information des Prisons (GIP) and a wide variety of his interviews, op-ed articles, etc. In showing that the intellectuals’ views differ in important ways from those of the scholars but nevertheless inhabit a crucial position in the overall edifice of their oeuvres, the article concludes that the practices of theorists deserve more attention for a comprehensive and more nuanced account of their thought.
from here

Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth

2011-06-16T14:26:00.000+10:00

Habermas is mentioned in this piece in NYT, reporting cognitive research on reasoning and argumentation by two French researchers:

"Because “individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation,” Mr. Mercier and Ms. Landemore, as a practical matter, endorse the theory of deliberative democracy, an approach that arose in the 1980s, which envisions cooperative town-hall-style deliberations. Championed by the philosophers John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, this sort of collaborative forum can overcome the tendency of groups to polarize at the extremes and deadlock, Ms. Landemore and Mr. Mercier said."
full here

Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts

2011-05-14T11:21:00.000+10:00

Barbara Fultner (ed.)
Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts

Barbara Fultner (ed.), Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts, Acumen Press, 2011, 264pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781844652372.

Reviewed by David Ingram, Loyola University Chicago

"Anyone who has read Habermas knows how daunting his writing can be. Aside from the notorious density and abstractness of his prose, there is the challenge posed by the sheer scope of his undertaking. Quite simply, he stands out among our great contemporary thinkers for having dared to write a system of philosophy that crosses both disciplinary and thematic boundaries. In addition to this challenge, his thought has undergone several major permutations and countless minor ones over the past half century, as evidenced by the thirty some odd books and collections he has authored.

So we are truly fortunate that Acumen chose to include a book on Habermas in its exceptional Key Concepts series. These volumes are designed to provide synoptic introductions to important thinkers. This volume, edited by the well-known Habermas translator and scholar, Barbara Fultner, is a fine addition to the series. The essays included in this volume are written by eminent specialists in their respective fields, many of whom studied with Habermas. They are uniformly of high quality, and most are written at a level that upper-division undergraduates should find accessible. Furthermore, although most of them present a sympathetic case for Habermas's ambitious undertaking, they do not shy away from noting potential weaknesses. In short, this is about as complete an account of Habermas's social philosophy as one might possibly expect from a modestly sized volume.

The best way to appreciate the merits of the volume is to go directly to its Table of Contents. With the exception of Fultner's fine introduction, in which she deftly summarizes the evolution of Habermas's thought through four stages, and Max Pensky's nicely written essay situating Habermas's post-metaphysical enterprise within its historical and intellectual context, the volume's eleven chapters fall under three headings that are arranged in a kind of logical order. The first heading, on communicative rationality, addresses the basic methodological and conceptual foundation of Habermas's system. This section begins with Melissa Yates's reflections on Habermas's post-metaphysical style of philosophical thinking. Yates observes that, unlike many philosophers, Habermas refuses to assign his philosophy any privileged epistemic status above or prior to the empirical sciences. This serves as a corrective to those who mistakenly believe that Habermas is a transcendental philosopher in the Kantian vein. At the same time, Habermas reserves a unique role for philosophy as a kind of placeholder or guardian for the most basic normative presuppositions underlying distinctly modern forms of life, whose abstract, rule-like competencies it seeks to "reconstruct" with the aid of the sciences. This latter endeavor requires that philosophy mediate interpretatively the sciences and our common-sense understanding of what it is that we do whenever we act, communicate, argue with one another, reason morally, and the like. In this way, Habermas's notion of philosophy defends -- in a weakly transcendental way, with the aid of an equally weak naturalism -- claims about universal normative assumptions to which we must all appeal if we are to make sense of our speech action, argumentative practice, and modes of moral, ethical, and legal deliberation."
full here

Habermas: Introduction and Analysis

2011-02-25T16:04:00.000+11:00

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2011-02-37 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews
David Ingram, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, Cornell University Press, 2010, 360pp., $26.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780801476013.

Reviewed by Eduardo Mendieta, Stony Brook University

David Ingram is no neophyte to either Habermas or Frankfurt School Critical Theory. A very good argument can be made, in fact, that Ingram belongs to what has been called 'Third Generation Critical Theory.'[1] His 1987 book, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason,[2] was indispensable for a new generation of scholars trying to make sense of Habermas' two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1984). Over the last two decades, in addition to editing volumes of the key writings by Frankfurt School critical theorists, he has written a series of books on democracy, rights, globalization, and cosmopolitanism that have traced a distinctive contribution to a more radical understanding of deliberative democracy. Such a sustained engagement with Habermas' work, in particular, and Critical Theory, in general, explains why this book is not simply an introduction.

Read the review in full here

Habermas, An Intellectual Biography

2011-01-13T10:40:00.000+11:00

Jürgen Habermas ranks today as the single most important public intellectual in all of Continental Europe. But he is also a formidable philosopher whose major contributions to social and political theory, constitutional law, historical sociology, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of language (to name only the fields he revisits with greatest frequency) are pitched at such air-gasping heights of difficulty and place such merciless demands upon the reader as to turn away all but the most fearless. This twofold persona—technical philosopher and public controversialist—does not strike most Europeans as unfamiliar. Sartre was such a creature, too. But in the Anglophone world it is a species that remains exotic. John Rawls, to whom Habermas is often compared, is justly remembered as the major Anglophone political philosopher of the twentieth century, but beyond the university walls his public presence was minimal. You have to go back to the early twentieth century—maybe to Bertrand Russell—to find a philosopher who achieved a similar prestige for both his technical philosophical achievements and his interventions on the public stage.
read full review here
link courtesy of Leiter Reprots

Remarks on the concept of critique in Habermasian thought

2010-12-29T19:20:00.000+11:00

Remarks on the concept of critique in Habermasian thought

Author: Simon Susena

Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of critique in Habermasian thought. Given that the concept of critique is a central theoretical category in the work of the Frankfurt School, it comes as a surprise that little in the way of a systematic account which sheds light on the multifaceted meanings of the concept of critique in Habermas's oeuvre can be found in the literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the various meanings that Habermas attributes to the concept of critique in 10 key thematic areas of his writings: (1) the public sphere, (2) knowledge, (3) language, (4) morality, (5) ethics, (6) evolution, (7) legitimation, (8) democracy, (9) religion, and (10) modernity. On the basis of a detailed analysis of Habermas's multifaceted concerns with the nature and function of critique, the study seeks to demonstrate that the concept of critique can be considered not only as a constitutive element but also as a normative cornerstone of Habermasian thought. The paper draws to a close by reflecting on some of the limitations of Habermas's conception of critique, arguing that in order to be truly critical in the Habermasian sense we need to turn the subject of critique into an object of critique.
Keywords: communication; critical capacity; critical theory; critique; emancipation; Habermas; language; rationality; validity
View Full Text Article

Recent papers by Habermas

2010-12-09T11:56:00.000+11:00

1) Jürgen Habermas (2010). Review Article: The 'Good Life'—A 'Detestable Phrase': The Significance of the Young Rawls's Religious Ethics for His Political Theory. European Journal of Philosophy 18 (3):443-454.

2)Jürgen Habermas (2010). The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights. Metaphilosophy 41 (4):464-480.
Abstract: Human rights developed in response to specific violations of human dignity, and can therefore be conceived as specifications of human dignity, their moral source. This internal relationship explains the moral content and moreover the distinguishing feature of human rights: they are designed for an effective implementation of the core moral values of an egalitarian universalism in terms of coercive law. This essay is an attempt to explain this moral-legal Janus face of human rights through the mediating role of the (...) concept of human dignity. This concept is due to a remarkable generalization of the particularistic meanings of those "dignities" that once were attached to specific honorific functions and memberships. In spite of its abstract meaning, "human dignity" still retains from its particularistic precursor concepts the connotation of depending on the social recognition of a status—in this case, the status of democratic citizenship. Only membership in a constitutional political community can protect, by granting equal rights, the equal human dignity of everybody
(from here)

3)Jürgen Habermas (2009). Life After Bankruptcy: An Interview. Constellations 16 (2):227-234.

Philosophical Foundations of Habermas’ Critique of Particularistic Liberalism

2010-12-07T22:37:00.000+11:00

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas has emerged as a sharp, and occasionally harsh, critic of the Bush administration’s policies since the Iraq war. Habermas has developed this critique in several of his short pieces and interviews, some of which are available in fine collections in both English and other languages. However, the occasional and journalistic character of Habermas’ political interventions often hide the theoretical basis of his critique. In this paper, I argue that Habermas’ critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy emanates from, and is founded upon, his conception of modernity, and specifically his views about the relationship between “particularity” and “generality.” The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how Habermas’ critique can actually be read as a critique of particularism, which Habermas sees operating behind American (and British) foreign policy, and which, in his view, compromises the key achievements of modernity (especially in its Kantian version.)

read full paper here (pdf)

On Habermas’s Critique of Husserl

2010-11-29T18:47:00.000+11:00

Matheson Russell

abstract
Over four decades, Habermas has put to paper many critical remarks on Husserl’s work as occasion has demanded. These scattered critical engagements nonetheless do add up to a coherent (if contestable) position regarding the project of transcendental phenomenology. This essay provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the arguments Habermas makes and offers a critical assessment of them. With an eye in particular to the theme of intersubjectivity (a theme of fundamental interest to both thinkers), it is argued that Habermas’s arguments do indeed show up deficiencies in Husserlian phenomenology and yet that they do not succeed in proving that we must abandon the methods and tasks of phenomenological research. On the contrary, it is argued that phenomenological methods may well be needed in order to investigate certain philosophical questions that Habermas’s theory of communication has thus far only partially addressed.

pdf

An Awareness of What Is Missing

2010-11-10T18:16:00.000+11:00

Jűrgen Habermas et al.
An Awareness of What Is Missing
Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Polity, Cambridge, 2010. 96pp., £12.99 pb
ISBN 9780745647210
Reviewed by Tom Angier

This slim volume is the outcome of a discussion held in 2007 between Jürgen Habermas and philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. Since Habermas’ contribution occupies a mere twenty-one pages, the book is effectively even slimmer than it appears. Indeed, anyone interested in Habermas’ views on the relation between faith and reason will find little here that goes beyond his much more substantial collection of essays, Between Naturalism and Religion (Polity 2008). Nonetheless, the present volume is worthwhile reading, and this for two main reasons. First, it was inspired in part by Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address in 2006, which, besides upsetting many people in the Muslim world, was itself an attempt to elaborate the relations between faith and reason. And second, it represents an attempt to engage a section of the academic world – viz. philosophers in Catholic universities – who rarely appear on the radar of philosophers in mainstream, de facto (if not de jure) secular institutions. So despite what I will argue are severe shortcomings, especially from a left-political perspective, this collection of brief exchanges is valuable, if only as a brave attempt to challenge the self-imposed constraints of current academia.

Full review here

Leadership and Leitkultur By JÜRGEN HABERMAS

2010-11-08T16:51:00.000+11:00

SINCE the end of August Germany has been roiled by waves of political turmoil over integration, multiculturalism and the role of the “Leitkultur,” or guiding national culture. This discourse is in turn reinforcing trends toward increasing xenophobia among the broader population.

These trends have been apparent for many years in studies and survey data that show a quiet but growing hostility to immigrants. Yet it is as though they have only now found a voice: the usual stereotypes are being flushed out of the bars and onto the talk shows, and they are echoed by mainstream politicians who want to capture potential voters who are otherwise drifting off toward the right. Two events have given rise to a mixture of emotions that are no longer easy to locate on the scale from left to right — a book by a board member of Germany’s central bank and a recent speech by the German president.

It all began with the advance release of provocative excerpts from “Germany Does Away With Itself,” a book that argues that the future of Germany is threatened by the wrong kind of immigrants, especially from Muslim countries. In the book, Thilo Sarrazin, a politician from the Social Democratic Party who sat on the Bundesbank board, develops proposals for demographic policies aimed at the Muslim population in Germany. He fuels discrimination against this minority with intelligence research from which he draws false biological conclusions that have gained unusually wide publicity.

In sharp contrast to the initial spontaneous objections from major politicians, these theses have gained popular support. One poll found that more than a third of Germans agreed with Mr. Sarrazin’s prognosis that Germany was becoming “naturally more stupid on average” as a result of immigration from Muslim countries.

After half-hearted responses in the press by a handful of psychologists who left the impression that there might be something to these claims after all, there was a certain shift in mood in the news media and among politicians toward Mr. Sarrazin. It took several weeks for Armin Nassehi, a respected sociologist, to take the pseudoscientific interpretation of the relevant statistics apart in a newspaper article. He demonstrated that Mr. Sarrazin adopted the kind of “naturalizing” interpretation of measured differences in intelligence that had already been scientifically discredited in the United States decades ago.
(full article here)

A postsecular world society?: an interview with Jürgen Habermas

2010-02-04T11:01:00.003+11:00

A postsecular world society?: an interview with Jürgen Habermas (from The Immanent Frame)

Excerpt:

"Our Western self-understanding of modernity emerged from the confrontation with our own traditions. The same dialectic between tradition and modernity repeats itself today in other parts of the world. There, too, one reaches back to one’s own traditions to confront the challenges of societal modernization, rather than to succumb to them. Against this background, intercultural discourses about the foundations of a more just international order can no longer be conducted one-sidedly, from the perspective of “first-borns.” These discourses must become habitual [sich einspielen] under the symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-taking if the global players are to finally bring their social-Darwinist power games under control. The West is one participant among others, and all participants must be willing to be enlightened by others about their respective blind spots. If we were to learn one lesson from the financial crisis, it is that it is high time for the multicultural world society to develop a political constitution."

Click here to read the remainder of this interview [pdf].
Thanks to Thomas Gregersen for the link.

Habermas on ethics, morality and European identity

2009-12-19T13:33:00.000+11:00

Habermas on ethics, morality and European identity
Author: Russell Keat a
Affiliation: a School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK

Abstract
This paper examines Habermas's theoretical account of ethical (as distinct from moral) reasoning in politics, presented in Between facts and norms, and considers its possible application to his later discussion of European identity and the need for political union to address the impact of globalisation and the threat posed by neoliberalism. It argues that this practical application of the theory point to serious defects in it: a failure to show that ethics differs from morality in being inseparable from identity, and an inability to explain how a genuinely rational debate about the specifically ethical dimensions of political issues can be conducted. It concludes by considering the relationship between Habermas's view of the place of ethics in political reasoning and debates about neutrality and perfectionism in liberal theory, including Dobson's recent argument in Supranational citizenship that different principles should operate at different levels of governance.

source

Science as instrumental reason: Heidegger, Habermas . .

2009-12-12T14:55:00.001+11:00

Abstract In modern continental thought, natural science is widely portrayed as an
exclusively instrumental mode of reason. The breadth of this consensus has partly
preempted the question of how it came to persuade. The process of persuasion, as it
played out in Germany, can be explored by reconstructing the intellectual exchanges
among three twentieth-century theorists of science, Heidegger, Habermas, and
Werner Heisenberg. Taking an iconic Heisenberg as a kind of limiting case of ‘‘the
scientist,’’ Heidegger and Habermas each found themselves driven to place new
constraints on their previously more capacious assessments of science, especially its
capacity to reflect on its method. Tracing how that happened, through archival and
historical contextualization and close readings of their texts, lets us make visible
Heidegger and Habermas’s intellectual affinities and argumentative parallels, which
derived not only from their shared grounding in earlier reactions against positivism,
but also from confrontation with contemporary events. The latter included, for
Heidegger, the rise of a technically powerful science exemplified by nuclear
physics, and for Habermas, post-World War II controversies over science, technology,
and their socially critical possibilities.

full article here

Habermas’s Later Pragmatist Turn

2009-11-03T11:44:00.005+11:00

Habermas’s Later Pragmatist Turn
By Ali Rizvi

Robert Brandom describes pragmatism “as a movement centered on the primacy of the practical.” This primacy of practice over theory is manifested in Habermas’s writings in two ways. First, it emerges in his lifelong insistence on the primacy of “know how” (what he often calls intuitive knowledge) over “know that.” This is a key Heideggerian distinction, which Habermas uses in his theoretical analyses and his formal pragmatics, as well as in developing his social theory. Second, it is manifested in Habermas’s rejection of what he calls the “spectator model” of knowledge, and his insistence that action has “cognitive” significance – in other words, that our way of acting is also our way of knowing the world. This is also derived from Heidegger’s notion of “being in the world.”

Habermas has always been a pragmatist in the senses mentioned above, but after Knowledge and Human Interest (KHI) he did not pay much attention to issues in theoretical philosophy; therefore, with his Truth and Justification (TJ) he wanted to amend this situation. In TJ, Habermas went back to revive the “weak naturalism” he espoused in KHI, and in so doing he aimed to achieve two things. First, he wished to relate his theoretical enterprise both to his formal pragmatics and to his theory of communicative action. Second, he wanted to overcome certain impasses and aporias that his theories of communicative action and social evolution face. His renewed emphasis on pragmatic themes is of crucial importance to both these endeavors.

In KHI, Habermas tried to marry Kantian transcendentalism with naturalism (in the broad sense of the term) by maintaining a distinction between “subjective/objective nature” and “nature in itself.” This, according to Habermas and his critics, led to an aporia similar to the one that Kant faced when making a distinction between “phenomenon” and “noumenon.” The aporia is this: in order to maintain the distinction between “subjective/objective nature” and “nature in itself,” it appears necessary to have a “glimpse behind the stage set by the human mind.” (TJ: 22). But to do this would be to violate the basic assumption of post metaphysics, which is something that Habermas wanted to avoid at any cost. In TJ, however, Habermas aims to show that the afore-mentioned aporia is not so much a result of attempting to marry a transcendental approach to naturalism, but is rather the result of a representationalism which must be abandoned in the wake of pragmatism. Representationalism conceives knowledge in terms of a two-way relation between subject and object, where access to what is beyond the object must be conceived in terms of a glimpse behind the constitution of the human mind. However, if knowledge is considered in pragmatic terms, and if we consequently abandon the representational model of knowledge and give action its cognitive due, we can transcend this aporia. Habermas claims that this requires the adoption of what he calls a “non-classical” form of realism.

In developing his formal pragmatics and theory of communicative action, Habermas initially tried to go beyond the representational model of knowledge, replacing the two-way model of representation with a three-way model in which an actor tries to reach an understanding with another actor about something in the world. Similarly, in his theory of communicative action, Habermas conceptualized objectivity as a condition of reaching an understanding between two or more interlocutors. However, this theory of objectivity is a far cry from our own realist intuitions about the world, and so Habermas’s renewed emphasis on pragmatism leads him to reconsider and deepen this model. The world is not only a condition of mutual understanding, but is also something we encounter in pursuing actions. We experience the resistance of reality when our plans are frustrated; we experience its cooperation when we are able to fulfil our plans of action.

The world that we experience in pursuing our material goals is beyond objectification (because objectification involves “mind” and not “being in the world” as such), and so we are able to get a “glimpse” into the existence and reality of a world beyond our “objectification,” albeit through our actions and not through our minds. This world which is beyond the world of our objectification is nothing but “nature in itself.” Thus we gain access to “nature in itself,” in this model, not on the level of perceptions of mind but through “disclosures” of action. This in turn helps us overcome the aporia mentioned above, of having to “glimpse beyond the stage set by the human mind” without having to relinquish the distinction between subjective world, objective world and nature in itself. The distinction is pertinent on the level of mind, but on the level of action we experience something which is beyond the distinctions which are made indispensible within the bounds of our mind and our language. Here, the world overwhelms us in a way, and we experience its resistance or cooperation on an immediate, direct and unmediated level.

The resistance (or cooperation) of the world that we face at the pragmatic level must also feed back to our linguistic and mental apparatus. This suggests that our mental and linguistic apparatuses have also developed under the constraints of reality, even if the constraint is an indirect one. This suggests a way out of contextualism that haunts any serious version of transcendentalism and linguistic turn. Habermas now claims that if our conceptual apparatus has developed under the constraints of reality, which has been shown to be a reality that resists us and is beyond the whims and caprice of our individual or communal desires, then we must take the continued viability of our conceptual repertoire as proof of their objectivity. This pulls the rugs from under the feet of any contextualism. However this doesn’t entail a return to conceptual realism, as the constraint on our conceptual apparatus is an indirect one and there is a certain distance between the constraints of reality and the workings of our language and our conceptual apparatus (Habermas calls it “half transcendence”). In this way, in Habermas’s “later” theoretical philosophy pragmatism plays a crucial role in combining transcendentalism and naturalism on the one hand, and realism and transcendentalism on the other.

References

Aboulafia, Mitchell, Myra Bookman and Catherine Kemp, eds, Habermas and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 2002).

Brandom, Robert. “Pragmatics and Pragmatisms,” in Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, eds. James Conant and Ursula M. Zeglen, 40-58 (London: Routledge, 2002).

Jürgen Habermas. Knowledge and Human Interests , trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1972).

Habermas, Jürgen. “A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests.” Philosophy of Social Sciences 3 (1973): 157-189.

Habermas, Jürgen. On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

Habermas, Jürgen. On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

Habermas, Jürgen. “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World” in Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, 67-94, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

Habermas, Jürgen. Truth and Justification, ed. and trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Habermas, Jürgen. Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005). [Why no translation?]

Habermas, Jürgen. “The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will: How Can Epistemic Dualism Be Reconciled with Ontological Monism?” (trans. Joel Anderson). Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal of the Philosophy of Mind and Action 10:1 (March 2007).

McDowell, John. Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

McDowell, John. “Experience the World,” in Reason and Nature : Lecture and Colloquium in Münster, 1999 (Münster : LIT, 2000).

McDowell, John. “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” in Robert Brandom, ed., Rorty and his Critics, 109-123 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

Renn, Joachim. “One world is enough.” European Journal of Social Theory 3, 4 (2000): 485-498.

Swindal, James. “Habermas's ‘Unconditional Meaning Without God': Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Ultimate Meaning.” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 26, 2 (2003): 126-149.

© 2009, Ali Rizvi.
[This is the English version of “Pragmatische Wende,”in Habermas-Handbuch: Leben –Werk – Wirkung, Herausgegeben von Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide und Cristina Lafont, Verlag J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart, 2009: 360-362.].

Audio with Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler & Cornel West

2009-11-03T11:36:00.001+11:00

Audio with Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler & Cornel West from the conference on "Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere"
(New York University, October 22, 2009): Here

The link courtesy of Thomas

The philosopher-citizen, by Charles Taylor

2009-10-20T17:38:00.001+11:00

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most prominent philosophers on the global scene of the last half century. His work is of an impressive range and depth. It would be impossible to sum it up in a short essay, but I shall try to single out three facets of his extraordinary achievement which help throw light on his deserved fame and influence.(read full here)

Habermas and analytical Marxism

2009-09-23T22:27:00.000+10:00

Habermas and analytical Marxism
Joseph Heath

University College, University of Toronto, Canada

John Roemer once described the ‘intellectual foundations’ of analytical Marxism as the recognition that, despite having a valid core, Marxism rested upon outdated social science. The solution, he believed, was to update the theory ‘using state-of-the-art methods of analytical philosophy and "positivist" social science’. If one takes this definition literally, Jürgen Habermas’ early work qualifies as that of an analytical Marxist. Yet although he developed his project in a way that was independent of the self-identified analytical Marxists, there are important points of convergence in their views. In particular, in their efforts to update Marxism, both Habermas and the analytical Marxists managed to talk themselves out of being Marxists in any recognizable sense of the term. This is a noteworthy outcome, given the differences in their points of departure. This article tracks the intellectual history of these two movements, in order to identify the tendencies that pushed this rather disparate group of theorists in the same direction.

Key Words: analytical Marxism • capitalism • egalitarianism • exploitation • functionalism • Jürgen Habermas • rational choice theory

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 8, 891-919 (2009)

The Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas:

2009-07-27T23:09:00.003+10:00

The Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas
A Critical Introduction
Uwe Steinhoff

"Jürgen Habermas seeks to defend the Enlightenment and with it an <"emphatical>", <"uncurtailed>" conception of reason against the post-modern critique of reason on the one hand, and against so-called scientism (which would include critical rationalism and the greater part of analytical philosophy) on the other. His objection to the former is that it is self-contradictory and politically defeatist; his objection to the latter is that, thanks to a standard of rationality derived from the natural sciences or from Weber's concept of purposive rationality, it leaves normative questions to irrational decisions. Habermas wants to offer an alternative, trying to develop a theory of communicative action that can clarify the normative foundations of a critical theory of society as well as provide a fruitful theoretical framework for empirical social research.

This study is a comprehensive and detailed analysis and sustained critique of Habermas' philosophical system since his pragmatist turn in the seventies. It clearly and precisely depicts Habermas' long chain of arguments leading from an analysis of speech acts to a discourse theory of law and the democratic constitutional state. Along the way the study examines, among other things, Habermas' theory of communicative action, transcendental and universal pragmatics and the argument from <"performative contradictions>", discourse ethics, the consensus theory of truth, Habermas' ideas on developmental psychology, communicative pathologies and social evolution, his theory of social order, the analysis of the tensions between system and lifeworld, his theory of modernity, and his theory of deliberative democracy. For all Habermas students this study will prove indispensable."

Sample chapter

Habermas honours Honneth on his 60th birthday

2009-07-18T23:04:00.003+10:00

Arbeit, Liebe, Anerkennung

Thanks to Thomas for the link.

A review of The Future ofHuman Nature. byJ¨urgen Habermas

2009-07-03T01:47:00.004+10:00

here (scroll down to read)

Critical Theory of World Risk Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision

2009-07-03T01:37:00.001+10:00

Critical Theory of World Risk Society:
A Cosmopolitan Vision
Ulrich Beck

A critical theory of world risk society must address at least three questions: (1) What is the basis of the critique? What is “critical” about this critical theory? (The question of the normative horizon of the world risk society) (2)What are the key theses and core arguments of this theory? Is it an empirical theory of society with critical intent? (3) To what extent does this theory break with the automatisms of modernization and globalization which have taken on a life of their own and rediscover the openness of human action to the future at the beginning of the 21st century political perspectives, cosmopolitan alternatives?

free download from here

Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Max Horkheimer

2009-07-03T00:57:00.002+10:00

here

Jürgen Habermans on Ralf Dahrendorf

2009-06-20T02:00:00.000+10:00

German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf died today at the age of 80. Jan Feddersen writes: "Dahrendorf was the first intellectual star of the fledging Bundesrepulik to seek and find acknowledgement abroad. He also studied in USA, received his first PhD in 1952 for a dissertation on the concept of justice in the writings of Karl Marx. In 1957 he obtained his 'habilitation' - recognition of the right to lecture in German universities - with the publication of 'Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society'. Jürgen Habermas, who celebrated his 80th birthday last week, and had been an admirer of Dahrendorf's since that time, as he admitted at Dahrendorf's birthday celebrations a few weeks ago, said: "With his constructive intellect that preferred to create clarity with idealised stylisations than to juggle with hermeneutics, Dahrendorg was remarkable for his powerful eloquence, his natural command of authority and his somewhat angular manner of speech. What singled him out from his peers was his ability to see off received ideas with avant-gardist aplomb."

from here

Habermas turns 80 today!

2009-06-18T10:29:00.001+10:00

Happy birthday Professor Habermas!

Habermas turns 80 tomorrow!!

2009-06-17T19:44:00.001+10:00

details here and here

Sentimentality, communicative action and the social self: Adam Smith meets Jürgen Habermas

2009-06-16T12:52:00.000+10:00

Sentimentality, communicative action and the social self: Adam Smith meets Jürgen Habermas
David Wilson
Department of Economics, Finance and International Business, London Metropolitan University, 84 Moorgate, London EC2M 6SQ, UK, d.wilson@londonmet.ac.uk

William Dixon

Department of Economics, Finance and International Business, London Metropolitan University, 84 Moorgate, London EC2M 6SQ, UK

There is a long and tortuous history of misinterpreting Smithian social theory. After rehearsing that history we offer here a way of understanding Smith that, unlike much of recent revisionist Smith scholarship, does not further add to this confusion. Our proposal is to understand the relation between moral and economic behaviour in Smith as analogous to the way in which Habermas makes strategic (and normatively oriented) behaviour parasitic on a more basic communicative competence. Given this analogy, it is ironic that Habermas's own understanding of Smith's theory also leaves much to be desired.

Key Words: economics • Jürgen Habermas • morality • sentiment • Adam Smith

History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 22, No. 3, 75-99 (2009)

Towards Reconciling Two Heroes: Habermas and Hegel

2009-06-10T11:13:00.003+10:00

Brandom's first major (?) piece on Habermas! Can be downloaded from here

Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

2009-05-28T23:21:00.002+10:00

Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Ciaran Cronin (trans.), Polity Press, 2008, 361pp., $26.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780745638256.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Flynn, Fordham University

Habermas's central aim in this collection of essays is to articulate the appropriate relation between "postmetaphysical thinking" and science and religion. He takes up issues related to both the philosophical and the public use of reason, and makes interesting proposals regarding their interrelation. Habermas is clearly worried about the spread of naturalistic worldviews ("scientism") and religious fundamentalism, but he dismisses neither naturalism nor religion. Rather, he defends what he calls "soft naturalism," which embraces a non-reductionist account of human language and thought in which normativity and intersubjectivity are central. Regarding religion, Habermas maintains that philosophy has long been enriched by secular "translations" of religious ideas. Moreover, he views at least "modernized" religions as allies in the public sphere in combating the effects of uncontrolled capitalist modernization and the spread of reductionistic thinking.

full here

CFP reminder: Joint Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy 2009

2009-05-20T22:14:00.003+10:00

This is the third and final ‘call for papers’ for the 5th Annual Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff; Wales, 27-29 August 2009.

Keynote speakers:

Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht)
Claire Colebrook (Penn State)
Leonard Lawlor (Penn State)
Christopher Norris (Cardiff)

The SEP-FEP Joint Conference offers faculty and graduate students the
opportunity to present papers in any area of European Philosophy.
Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted by 1 June 2009 to
Juliana Cardinale, either in electronic form to J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk or
by mail to:

Forum for European Philosophy
Room J5, European Institute
Cowdray House, Portugal Street
London School of Economics, London, WC2A 2AE United Kingdom

There are also two open plenary sessions:

1. The Future of Hermeneutics (Chair: Nicholas Davey, Dundee) and

2. The Role of Imagery in Ontology and Thought (Chair: Clive Cazeaux,
UWIC).

In addition, proposals relating to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project are
especially welcome. Cardiff is a city of arcades. A work of sound art
based on Cardiff's arcades has been commissioned to accompany the
conference.

If you would be interested in participating in any of these, please
contact Clive Cazeaux by 1 June 2009 at ccazeaux@uwic.ac.uk

A prize of £250 will be awarded to the best graduate paper, as judged by
members of the SEP and FEP Committees. Graduates who would like their
papers considered for the prize should email their papers (maximum 3,000
words) as Word 2003 attachments to Clive Cazeaux at ccazeaux@uwic.ac.uk
by 3 August 2009.

Deadline summary:
Paper abstracts by 1 June 2009 to J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk
Graduate papers in full by 3 August 2009 to ccazeaux@uwic.ac.uk

Further details, including registration and accommodation, are available
on the conference website here

New blog on Habermas and Rawls

2009-05-20T21:54:00.003+10:00

A new exciting blog by Thomas Gregersen! According to Thomas it will bring news on the political thoughts of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls.The blog will mainly have comments on new books and articles, and information about conferences and other events.

It will be written in both English and German.

See here

The blog will be a supplement to his Habermas website

Its Habermas bibliography and lists on secondary literature will still be updated regularly.

Habermas' acceptance speech for Brunet Prize for Human Rights 2008

2009-05-11T11:12:00.002+10:00

Jürgen Habermas received the International Brunet Prize for Human Rights 2008 at a ceremony on May 9, 2009, in Pamplona, Spain.

Read Habermas's acceptance speech (in German) here

The link courtesy of Thomas

Morality and Critical Theory: On the Normative Problem of Frankfurt School Social Criticism

2009-05-01T23:12:00.000+10:00

Morality and Critical Theory: On the Normative Problem of Frankfurt School Social Criticism
James Gordon Finlayson

I. The Problem of Normative Foundations: Habermas's Original Criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer: In The Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas writes:

From the beginning, critical theory labored over the difficulty of giving an account of its own normative foundations ...1

Call this Habermas's original objection to the problem of normative foundations. It has been hugely influential both in the interpretation and assessment of Frankfurt School critical theory and in the development of later variants of it. Nowadays it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that any critical social theory in possession of normative...

full here

Bibliography of the secondary literature on Habermas

2009-04-20T22:47:00.001+10:00

Articles and books on Jürgen Habermas 1992-2009

A bibliography of the secondary literature 1992-2009 on Jürgen Habermas is now available here

The link and info courtesy of Thomas Gregersen

Habermas's Political Thought 1984-1996: A Historical Interpretation

2009-03-29T23:18:00.002+11:00

In the latest issue of the journal "Modern Intellectual History" (April 2009) Matthew Specter has written a very interesting article on Habermas' s recent political thought:

The article is available here free

The link and info courtesy of Thomas Gregersen

Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation

2009-03-19T16:30:00.001+11:00

DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION: THE FOUCAULT/HABERMAS DEBATE RECONSIDERED

AMY ALLEN

Clarifying the Foucault—Habermas debate

2009-02-20T16:26:00.001+11:00

Clarifying the Foucault—Habermas debate
Morality, ethics, and `normative foundations'
Matthew King

Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada

Habermas charges that Foucault's work `cannot account for its normative foundations'. Responses to Habermas have consisted mostly of, on one hand, attempts to identify foundational normative assumptions implicit in Foucault's work, and, on the other hand, attempts to show that Foucault's work discredits the very idea of normative foundations. These attempts have suffered from a lack of clarity about Habermas' notion of normative foundations. In this article I clarify the terms of the debate by considering Habermas' critique of Foucault in light of his moral philosophy. I examine three representative responses to Habermas on Foucault's behalf, which attempt to identify normative foundations in Foucault's work, and I show why none of them meets Habermas' requirements. Finally, I argue that while Foucault's political judgments cannot have normative foundations, Foucault does adhere to the principles of Habermas' discourse ethics, and his doing so does not conflict with his genealogical approach.

Key Words: cryptonormativity • discourse ethics • Michel Foucault • foundations • Jürgen Habermas • truth

from here

Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Fut

2009-02-11T14:27:00.001+11:00

Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future
Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future, MIT Press, 2006, 333pp., $37.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780262112994.

Reviewed by Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame
==

The fate of reason today hangs in the balance. This is no small matter. Ever since its historical beginnings, reason or rationality has been the central focus and point of honor of Western modernity -- a focus enshrined in Descartes' cogito, Enlightenment rationalism, and Kantian (and neo-Kantian) critical philosophy. The result of this focus was an asymmetrical dichotomy: separated from the external world of "matter" (or nature), the cogito assumed the role of superior task master and overseer -- a role fueling the enterprise of modern science and technology. During the past century, the edifice of Western modernity has registered a trembling, due to both internal and external contestations. Subverting the modern asymmetry, a host of thinkers – with views ranging from American pragmatism to European life philosophy and phenomenology -- have endeavored to restore pre-cognitive "experience" (including sense perception and affect) to its rightful place. In the context of French "postmodernism," a prominent battle cry has been to dislodge "logocentrism" (the latter term often equated with anthropocentrism). In the ambiance of recent German philosophy, the battle lines have been clearly marked: pitting champions of modern rationalism, represented by Jürgen Habermas, against defenders of experiential "world disclosure," represented by Martin Heidegger. In his book, Nikolas Kompridis endeavors to shed new light on this controversy, with the aim not so much of bringing about a cease fire but of providing resources for arriving at better mutual understanding.

Kompridis does not exactly assume a position above the contestants (he repeatedly rejects the "view from nowhere"). As the book's subtitle indicates, his point of departure is "critical theory" as championed by the Frankfurt School, and his attempt is to nudge that theory beyond a certain rationalist orthodoxy in the direction of possible "future" horizons. While appreciating some of its merits -- such as the "linguistic turn" and the emphasis on "communicative" rationality -- Kompridis finds Habermas's reformulation of the Frankfurt program on the whole unhelpful and debilitating. In his words (p. 17): "For all there is to recommend it, Habermas's reformulation has produced a split between new and old critical theory so deep that the identity and future of critical theory are at risk." The main reason is that the "normative gain" deriving from the linguistic turn remains attached to narrow rationalist premises that have "needlessly devalued" the theory's potential. In Kompridis's view, Habermas's evolving thought exhibits a break or rupture (quite apart from the linguistic turn): namely, a move toward pure "theory" which happened soon after the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests. "That turn to theory," he writes (pp. 232-234), "refashioned the project of critical theory as a strenge Wissenschaft, less bound by or beholden to the historical and existential exigencies of modernity" -- thereby undermining modernity's intrinsic "relation to time." As a result of this refashioning, critical theory was catapulted in the direction of an abstractly rational universalism disdainful of cultural and practical modes of pluralism. The upshot was a growing "insensitivity to particularity," justifying the suspicion that the basic concepts of communicative rationality had from the start been "rigged in favor of the universal." But, the book adds sharply, "a provinciality-destroying reason is a meaning-destroying reason" and the latter is "a history-destroying reason."

Full here

Gordon Finlayson's Website and Blog

2009-01-21T01:46:00.000+11:00

Here

:: Selection of Habermas’ works in 5 volumes

2008-12-05T06:52:00.002+11:00

In June 2009 Suhrkamp Verlag will celebrate Jürgen Habermas’s 80th birthday by publishing a selection of Habermas’ works in 5 volumes – Philosophische Texte: Studienausgabe in fünf Bänden. Each volume will have a new introduction by Jürgen Habermas.

The 5 volumes are:
1. Sprachtheoretische Grundlegung der Soziologie
2. Diskurs- und Sprachtheorie
3. Diskursethik
4. Politische Theorie
5. Kritik der Vernunft

Suhrkamp Verlag:
”Am 18. Juni 2009 feiert der Philosoph und Soziologe Jürgen Habermas seinen 80. Geburtstag. Zu diesem Anlaß hat er eine systematische Auswahl von wichtigen Texten zusammengestellt, einige davon bislang unveröffentlicht, die den philosophischen Kern seines umfangreichen Werks freilegen. Jürgen Habermas hat zu jedem Band eine ausführliche Einleitung verfaßt, in der er die Grundzüge und Motive seines philosophischen Denkens zu Themen wie Sprache und Wahrheit, Vernunft und Moral, Recht und Demokratie umreißt, wie sie sich in Auseinandersetzung mit den Einzelwissenschaften herausgebildet haben. Die Bände, die auch einzeln erhältlich sind, können somit an die Stelle ungeschriebener philosophischer Monographien treten und bieten einen umfassenden Einblick in ein Denken, das die Geistesgeschichte der Gegenwart wie kaum ein zweites geprägt hat.”

1. Sprachtheoretische Grundlegung der Soziologie

Vorwort
Einleitung
1. Vorlesungen zu einer sprachtheoretischen Grundlegung der Soziologie
2. Erläuterungen zum Begriff des kommunikativen Handelns
3. Handlungen, Sprechakte, sprachlich vermittelte Interaktionen und Lebenswelt
4. Individuierung durch Vergesellschaftung. Zu G.H. Meads Theorie der Subjektivität
5. Aspekte der Handlungsrationalität
6. Rekonstruktive vs. verstehende Sozialwissenschaften
7. Konzeptionen der Moderne. Ein Rückblick auf zwei Traditionen

2. Diskurs- und Sprachtheorie

Vorwort
Einleitung
1. Hermeneutische und analytische Philosophie. Zwei komplementäre Spielarten der linguistischen Wende
2. Zur Kritik der Bedeutungstheorie
3. Rationalität und Verständigung. Sprechakttheoretische Erläuterungen zum Begriff der kommunikativen Rationalität
4. Kommunikatives Handeln und detranszendentalisierte Vernunft
5. Wahrheitstheorien
6. Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung. Zu Richard Rortys pragmatischer Wende
7. Realismus nach der sprachpragmatischen Wende

3. Diskursethik

Vorwort
Einleitung
1. Diskursethik – Notizen zu einem Begründungsprogramm
2. Diskursethik und Gesellschaftstheorie. Ein Interview mit T. Hviid Nielsen
3. Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik
4. Eine genealogische Betrachtung zum kognitiven Gehalt der Moral
5. Vom praktischen, ethischen und moralischen Gebrauch der praktischen Vernunft
6. Richtigkeit und Wahrheit. Zum Sinn der Sollgeltung moralischer Urteile und Normen
7. Zur Architektonik der Diskursdifferenzierung. Kleine Replik auf eine große Auseinandersetzung)

4. Politische Theorie

Vorwort
Einleitung
1. Volkssouveränität als Verfahren
2. Drei normative Modelle der Demokratie
3. Hat die Demokratie noch eine epistemische Dimension? Empirische Forschung und normative Theorie
4. Über den internen Zusammenhang von Rechtsstaat und Demokratie
5. Der demokratische Rechtsstaat – eine paradoxe Verbindung widersprüchlicher Prinzipien?
6. Vorpolitische Grundlagen des demokratischen Rechtsstaates?
7. Kulturelle Gleichbehandlung – und die Grenzen des Postmodernen Liberalismus
8. Zur Legitimation durch Menschenrechte
9. Hat die Konstitutionalisierung des Völkerrechts noch eine Chance?
10. Konstitutionalisierung des Völkerrechts und die Legitimationsprobleme einer verfaßten Weltgesellschaft
5. Kritik der Vernunft

5. Kritik der Vernunft

Vorwort
Einleitung
1. Die Philosophie als Platzhalter und Interpret
2. Was Theorien leisten können – und was nicht. Ein Interview
3. Noch einmal: Zum Verhältnis von Theorie und Praxis)
4. Metaphysik nach Kant
5. Motive nachmetaphysischen Denkens
6. Die Einheit der Vernunft in der Vielfalt ihrer Stimmen
7. Von den Weltbildern zur Lebenswelt
8. Das Sprachspiel verantwortlicher Urheberschaft und das Problem der Willensfreiheit: Wie läßt sich der epistemische Dualismus mit einem ontologischen Monismus versöhnen?
9. Die Revitalisierung der Weltreligionen - Herausforderung für ein säkulares Selbstverständnis der Moderne ?
10. Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt
11. Exkurs: Transzendenz von innen, Transzendenz ins Diesseits
12. Glauben und Wissen. Replik auf Einwände

Link courtesy Thomas Gregersen

Life after Bankruptcy

2008-11-29T00:48:00.002+11:00

The interview in "Die Zeit" on the financial crisis is now available in an English translation:

Life after Bankruptcy

original German here

Link courtesy of Thomas Gregersen

Habermas on foreclosure gloom

2008-11-08T04:00:00.003+11:00

Die Zeit 06.11.2008

"I hope that the neoliberal agenda will no longer be taken at face value, but will put up for negotiation. The entire programme of uncontrolled subjugation of everyday life to the imperatives of the market must be put to trial," says philosopher Jürgen Habermas in a lengthy conversation with Thomas Assheuer. Habermas watched the impact of the financial crisis with his own eyes, as a guest lecturer in the USA. "The screens flickered with the Hopperesque melancholy of an endless loop of abandoned houses in Florida and elsewhere – with "Foreclosure" signs on the front lawns. Then came the buses full of prospective buyers from Europe and Latin America followed by estate agents who gave guided tours of bedrooms ransacked in fits of anger and desperation. After my return I was surprised at the difference between US jumpiness and the business-as-usual equanimity here in Germany."

from here

The original interview here

The Future(s) of Critical Theory

2008-11-02T13:00:00.001+11:00

The Future(s) of Critical Theory
Erste Graduiertenkonferenz, Frankfurt am Main, 19.-21.März 2009

Call for Papers

Kritische Theorie muss mit kleinem "k" geschrieben werden. Nicht nur
deshalb, weil die Ansätze, die sich heute in der Tradition der so
genannten "Frankfurter Schule" sehen, so divers geworden sind, dass es
fragwürdig erscheint, noch von einem einzigen einheitlichen Ansatz zu
sprechen, auch aus inhaltlichen Gründen verbietet sich die Reduzierung
kritischen Denkens auf ein akademisches "Lager". Viel eher als ein
einheitliches philosophisches Denkgebäude bezeichnet der Begriff
"kritische Theorie" unterschiedliche Formen der radikalen
Infragestellung, die bis heute in den geistes- und
gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, aber auch in den Debatten
um eine emanzipatorische politische Praxis höchst lebendig geblieben
sind. Wie sich an der Vielzahl aktueller Publikationen zum Thema ablesen
lässt, wird gegenwärtig jedoch auch eine rege Diskussion darüber
geführt, was überhaupt noch ein angemessener Begriff von Kritik und
kritischer Theorie sein kann. Dies mag man als Ausdruck einer Krise und
Orientierungslosigkeit der kritischen Theorie sehen, vielleicht aber
auch als Chance für eine erneute Lagebestimmung und als eine
Aufforderung zur Reflexion.

Die Graduiertenkonferenz, die im nächsten Jahr erstmalig stattfinden
wird, will dazu einen Beitrag leisten. Sie bietet Doktorand/innen und
Postdoktorand/innen aus Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften die
Gelegenheit, eigene Forschungsprojekte zu diskutieren und sich mit den
Herausforderungen der kritischen Theorie auseinanderzusetzen. Weil sich
erst am Gegenstand erweisen kann, was kritische Theorie ist, sind dabei
einzelwissenschaftliche Studien ebenso willkommen wie metatheoretische
Überlegungen. Wir laden ausdrücklich auch ein zur Einsendung von
work-in-progress, exposéhaften Präsentationen oder in Kooperation
entstandenen Arbeiten.

Eingereicht werden können Abstracts für Vorträge zu folgenden (oder
anderen) Themen:

__Was ist Kritik? Was ist kritisch an der kritischen Theorie? Wie
kritisch ist die kritische Theorie?
__K/kritische Theorie(n): 1, 2, 3,... ganz viele Generationen;
Anerkennung, Rechtfertigung und Verständigung; kritische Theorie und
Poststrukturalismus; Kritik, Geneaologie, Dekonstruktion; Kantianismus,
Hegelianismus, Nietzscheanismus; Postcolonial Studies, Feminismus und queer
__Kritik mit Methode: Theorie und Empirie; Philosophie und Soziologie;
Erkenntnis und Interesse; militante Untersuchung
__Kritik und das Gute Leben: Begehren, Liebe, Intimität, Affekte, "das
Private" und natürlich Freundschaft
__Kritische Theorie und Kritik der Politik: Demokratie, Sozialismus,
Liberalismus; Macht und/oder Herrschaft; Recht, Staat, Polizei und
Souveränität
__Versöhnung mit dem Kapitalismus? (Ir)rationalität, Entfremdung und
Verdinglichung; alter und neuer Geist des Kapitalismus; Umverteilung
oder Enteignung; Reform oder Revolution
__Die Kultur der Kritik: Sub-, Pop- und Mainstreamkultur(industrie);
Kultur- und Medientheorie; Hegemonie und Diskurs; Narratologie,
Semiotik, Rhetorik

Technics

Abstracts sollten die Länge von 300 Wörtern nicht überschreiten.
Deadline ist der 31. November 2008. Die Auswahl der Beiträge erfolgt bis
spätestens 1.1.2009. Eine Publikation ausgewählter Beiträge nach der
Konferenz wird angestrebt. Die Vorträge werden in einem blind review
ausgewählt, allerdings wird bei der endgültigen Auswahl darauf geachtet,
dass mindestens 50 % der Vorträge an Frauen vergeben werden. Bitte die
Abstracts ohne Name oder sonstige Hinweise auf die Autorin/den Autor
einreichen sowie im Anschreiben Titel des eingereichten Vorschlags
nennen. Konferenzsprachen sind Deutsch und Englisch, Abstracts können in
beiden Sprachen eingereicht werden. Die Vorträge sollen eine Länge von
ca. 20 Minuten haben.

Keynote

Keynote Speaker der Konferenz sind Bonnie Honig (Chicago), Axel Honneth
(Frankfurt) und Emmanuel Renault (Paris/Lyon).

Kontakt

Abstracts können per E-Mail eingereicht werden an
info@graduateconferencefrankfurt.de

Nähere Information: www.graduateconferencefrankfurt.de

_____________________

The Future(s) of Critical Theory
First Graduate Conference in Frankfurt am Main, 19.-21 March 2009

Call for Papers

Whether or not "critical theory" constitutes a well-defined, easily
identifiable and self-contained school of thought has been a matter of
debate. For the organizers of this conference, given the plurality of
theoretical projects that consider themselves in the tradition of the
"Frankfurt School," critical thinking cannot be reduced to one academic
'camp' in any meaningful way. Rather than representing one coherent
philosophical paradigm, 'critical theory' embodies a diverse set of
practices of radical questioning exercised in various discourses
including that of arts, social and political sciences as well as radical
political debate. Moreover critical theory is a highly self-reflexive
process. Thus, rather than being a sign of crisis or lack of
orientation, the increasing number of publications about the meaning and
significance of "critique" and "critical theory" in recent years point
to a vibrant and diverse intellectual community constituted around
similar theoretical and political commitments. The existence of
different theoretical positions and disagreements within that community
can be best interpreted as an invitation to reconsider one's own stance
in relation to other ways of critical thinking and to reflect on common
grounds.

"The Future(s) of Critical Theory" Graduate Conference in Frankfurt aims
to serve as a forum for this ongoing debate. We invite PhD students and
postdocs from the humanities and the social sciences to discuss their
work in relation to the challenges posed by the current debates on the
status of critical theory today. Critical theory proves itself only in
relation to its concrete object of investigation. We are therefore
equally looking forward to the presentation of empirical research as to
theoretical reflections.

Contributions may include -- but need not be limited to -- the following
themes:

__What is Critique? What makes critical theories critical? How critical
is Critical Theory?

__C/critical Theory(ies): 1,2,3...many Generations of critical
theory(ies); Critical Theory and Post/structuralism; Critique,
Genealogy, Deconstruction; Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche; Postcolonial Studies,
Feminism, queer.

__Methodologies of critique: Theory and Practice; Philosophy and
Sociology; Knowledge and Human Interest; Militant Investigation,
Collective Theorization.

__Critique and the Good Life: Desire, Love, Intimacy, Affect, 'The
Private' and of course Friendship.

__Critical Theory, The Political and Politics: Democracies, Socialisms,
Liberalisms; Power and/or Domination; Law, State, Police and Sovereignty.

__Theorizing Capitalism: (Ir)rationality, Alienation and Reification;
Old and New Spirit of Capitalism; Redistribution or Expropriation;
Reform or Revolution.

__Cultures of Critique: Sub-, Pop- and Mainstream- Culture (industries);
Media and Cultural Studies; Hegemony and Discourse; Narratology,
Semiotics and Rhetoric.

Submission Information

Please submit abstracts of a maximum of 300 words to the following
e-mail address: info@graduateconferencefrankfurt.de
. We accept proposals until
the 31. November 2008. Languages of the conference will be German and
English, abstracts can be submitted in either language. Papers presented
at the conference should not exceed the duration of twenty minutes and
will be followed by a brief discussion.
Papers will be selected through a blind review process therefore please
do not mark your name or other indications of the author on abstracts
and make sure to clearly state the title of your proposal in the email.
Candidates will be informed by January 1st whether their paper has been
accepted for presentation.

The publication of a selection of conference papers is intended.

Keynote speakers

Keynote speakers are Bonnie Honig (Chicago), Axel Honneth (Frankfurt)
and Emmanuel Renault (Paris/Lyon).

Contact

For further information see www.graduateconferencefrankfurt.de
.

Habermas' Method: Rational Reconstruction

2008-10-31T16:42:00.000+11:00

Habermas' Method: Rational Reconstruction
Jørgen Pedersen

University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Given the prominent position Habermas' philosophy has gained, it is surprising that his method, rational reconstruction, has not caused more debate. This article clarifies what this method consists of, and shows how it is used in two of Habermas' research programs. The method is an interesting, but problematic way of confronting some of the basic epistemological questions in the social sciences. It represents an alternative to both the empirical-analytical and the hermeneutic tradition. On the basis of this methodology, Habermas' work is situated between the transcendental and the empirical approach. A fundamental problem is that it remains unclear how to test the hypothesis put forward through rational reconstruction.

Key Words: Philosophical method • rational reconstruction • critical theory • formal pragmatics • development theory • Jürgen Habermas

from here

Communicative Reason and Intercultural Understanding

2008-10-22T02:34:00.001+11:00

Communicative Reason and Intercultural Understanding
A Critical Discussion of Habermas
Mihaela Czobor-Lupp

Georgetown University, mihaelaclupp@aol.com

Although Habermas sees intercultural understanding as a political task, his model of communicative rationality cannot satisfactorily explain how this could happen. One reason is the definition of the aesthetic, form-giving, moment of imagination, which reflects deeper epistemological and linguistic assumptions of discourse ethics. Despite sporadic attempts to recognize the role of rhetoric and poetry as an indispensable part of the communicative praxis, at the end of the day, Habermas sees language as fundamentally geared toward transparency and clarity, and not as endowed with poetic power and polyphonic creativity. My article aims to further develop, with the help of Vico and Bakhtin, the incipient thread in Habermas's discourse ethics that recognizes the importance of linguistic creativity and of imagination in communicative practice. This would help one to argue that, even when rational consensus and agreement cannot be achieved, dialogue is still not abandoned. This is the case because, through a larger definition of the dialogical, which adds to the discursive aspect, an aesthetic, rhetorical, and metaphorical dimension, it is possible to say that, even when conflicting, different voices and languages are still creatively and imaginatively interilluminating and hybridizing each other. Thus, they still transform each other, creating, at the same time, a prediscursive commonality, that can function as a necessary prerequisite for intercultural understanding.

Key Words: aesthetics • Bakhtin • discourse ethics • Habermas • imagination • intercultural understanding • Vico

here

Redeeming Labor: Making Explicit the Virtue Theory in Habermas's Discourse Ethics

2008-10-21T00:15:00.001+11:00

Redeeming Labor: Making Explicit the Virtue Theory in Habermas's Discourse Ethics
Leland L. Glenna

The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, USA, llg13@psu.edu

The assertion that neo-classical economics is value-neutral is not just problematic because it is false, but also because it masks the origins of neo-classical economics as a moral science that has had a normative influence on social interaction. However, critics need to move beyond merely exposing the value-laden nature of neo-classical economics if the social sciences are to counter the emotivism of neo-classical economics and to reclaim their foundation as the moral sciences. A social theory of action is needed that acknowledges people's capacity to act virtuously. As a product of the German Enlightenment Tradition, Habermas relies upon an implicit Lutheran neighbor-love ethic when he constructs his theory of communicative action and discourse ethics. A theory that recognizes the capacity of people to collectively generate virtues which then govern their actions offers the potential to redeem labor from emotivism.

Key Words: discourse ethics • emotivism • neo-classical economics • virtue theory

from here

Who are the citizens of Europe?

2008-08-19T14:32:00.001+10:00

Europe needs a binding moral foundation not a pan-European referendum, argues Alfred Grosser

The Irish referendum raises many questions. Now I don't mean the ones concerning the circumstances of the 'No' vote. Questions such as: Was the economy slowing down instead of thriving on EU assistance as it had been until recently? Or: Was the advertising for the 'No' campaign funded by conservative anti-European Americans of Irish descent? No, the issues I want to discuss are commentaries which say: This is what happens when you disregard the people and submit a treaty which has been drawn up undemocratically and is incomprehensible to boot! Philosopher Jürgen Habermas also recently expressed his doubts about democratic practice in the EU. He suggested combining next year's European elections with a European referendum.

full here

Emancipation or accommodation?: Habermasian vs. Rawlsian deliberative democracy

2008-08-19T14:07:00.000+10:00

Emancipation or accommodation?
Habermasian vs. Rawlsian deliberative democracy
Christian F. Rostbøll
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

The development of the theory of deliberative democracy has culminated in a synthesis between Rawlsian political liberalism and Habermasian critical theory. Taking the perspective of conceptions of freedom, this article argues that this synthesis is unfortunate and obscures some important differences between the two traditions. In particular, the idea of internal autonomy, which was an important, implicit idea in the ideology critique of the earlier Habermas, falls out of view. There is no room for this dimension of freedom in political liberalism and it has largely disappeared from the later Habermas. In so far as others have followed Rawls and Habermas, deliberative democratic theory has converged around a less critical and more accommodationist view of freedom. If we want to keep deliberative democracy as a critical theory of contemporary society, we should resist this convergence. Our starting point should not be `the fact of reasonable pluralism' but rather `the fact of unreflective acquiescence'. This article argues for incorporating internal autonomy in a complex theory of freedom to which deliberative democracy should be normatively committed.

Key Words: autonomy • deliberative democracy • freedom • Jürgen Habermas • ideology critique • John Rawls

from

here

European prize goes to philosopher Habermas

2008-08-17T16:45:00.001+10:00

The European Prize of Political Culture has been awarded to the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas at the Locarno Film Festival.

Habermas' theories have greatly contributed to the evolution of modern social sciences, the Hans Ringier Foundation, patrons of the €50,000 prize said.

The philosopher, born in 1929, is best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, the topic and title of his first book.

Last year the prize went to Serbian president Boris Tadic; Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister received the honour in 2006. The prize is in its third year.

from here

H/T Continental Philosophy

Ohne Muslime kein Europa

2008-06-30T22:48:00.002+10:00

"Arno Widmann witnessed a memorable meeting at Schloss Elmau, between Tariq Ramadan, the controversial voice of European Muslims, and Jürgen Habermas, the "leading theorist of the new world confusion." Extremely impressed by Ramadan, Widmann was inspired to consider whether German Jews were not the first Germans. "Most Germans saw themselves as Hesseners, Frankfurters, Bavarians, Pfalzians rather than Germans. The Jews were not given the opportunity to see themselves as Bavarians. They wanted to be Germans. Perhaps Europe is in a similar situation today. The Irish are first and foremost Irish, the Danish are Danish, the Germans Germans and the Belgians are primarily Flemish or Walloon. Immigrants who are prevented from becoming Irish, Danes and Germans but who are called upon to be more European that Europeans ever were, have no option other than to become Europeans. They will be the first true Europeans. No Europe without Muslims."

from here

also see this

And the Wheels Stopped Turning

2008-06-20T21:06:00.005+10:00

A SEARCH FOR EUROPE'S FUTURE
And the Wheels Stopped Turning

By Jürgen Habermas

European governments are at their wits' end. It is time for them to admit it -- and let the public decide about the future of the European Union.
and everything comes to a grinding halt.

The farmers are upset about falling global prices and the new regulations constantly coming from Brussels. Those at the bottom of the social ladder are upset about the growing gap between rich and poor, especially evident in a country where both groups live in close proximity. The citizens despise their own politicians, who promise the world but who lack perspective and do not (cannot) deliver.

And then along comes a referendum over a treaty that is too complicated to be understood. EU membership has been more or less advantageous. Why should anything be changed? Doesn't the strengthening of European institutions necessarily lead to a weakening of democratic voices, which are only heard within the national public sphere?

The citizens sense that they are being patronized. Once again, they are to ratify something in the making of which they were not involved. The government has said that this time the referendum will not be repeated until the people give in. And aren't the Irish, this small, obstinate people, the only ones in all of Europe who are actually being asked for their opinions?

They don't want to be treated like cattle being driven to the voting booth. With the exception of three members of parliament who voted "no" on the issue, the Irish people and the entire Irish political class are entirely at odds. In a sense, it is also a referendum over politics in general, making it all the more tempting to send "politics" a message. This temptation is one felt everywhere today.

One can only speculate on the motives behind the Irish "no" vote. But the first official reactions have been clear. Suddenly roused out of complacency, European governments don't want to appear helpless. They are looking for a "technical" solution -- which would result in a repeat of the Irish referendum.

This, though, is little more than unadulterated cynicism on the part of the decision makers, especially given their protestations of respect for the electorate. It is also wind in the sails of those actively wondering whether semi-authoritarian forms of pseudo-democracy practiced elsewhere are perhaps more effective after all.

The purpose of the Lisbon Treaty was to finally achieve the organizational reform intended, but not completed, by the 2001 European Summit in Nice. That summit took place before the European Union's membership was expanded from 15 member states to 27. The eastward expansion, with the broadened prosperity gap and increased diversity of interests, has led to an even greater need for integration in the mean time.

These new conflicts and tensions cannot be addressed by European governing bodies in the manner to which they have become accustomed. After the failure of the proposed European constitution in 2005, the Lisbon Treaty represented a bureaucratically negotiated compromise to be pushed through behind the backs of the citizenry. With this most recent tour de force, European governments have callously demonstrated that they alone are shaping Europe's future. There remained only that one tiresome exception mandated by the Irish constitution.

The treaty itself was little more than a stalling response to the shock of 2005's failure. The ratification process came to a halt in France and the Netherlands before it could even reach the real hurdle in Great Britain. The predicament is even worse today. Business as usual? Or is it perhaps time to realize that, for European unity to deepen, Brussels must shift to a more participatory style of democracy.

Until Nice, the integration process, fuelled by economic liberalism, was pursued by the elites over the heads of the population. But since then, the successes of economic dynamism are increasingly perceived as a zero-sum game. There are more and more losers across Europe.

Justifiable socio-economic fears and consequent short-sighted reactions may explain the unstable mood. But the public's frame of mind can be influenced by political parties -- by offering the electorate a credible vision. Unsolved problems should be taken more seriously than transient states of feeling.

The failed referendums are a signal that the elitist mode of European unification is, thanks to its own success, reaching its limits. These limits can only be surmounted if the pro-European elites stop excusing themselves from the principle of representation and shed their fears of contact with the electorate.

The divide between the political decision-making authority granted to the EU in Brussels and Strasbourg on the one hand, and the nation state-bound opportunities provided by participatory democracy on the other, has become too large.

This is all the more awkward because competencies are unevenly distributed between the national governments and the super-national level. The sociopolitical and cultural side-effects of the welcomed market freedoms implemented across Europe are being passed on to the individual countries, which in turn are denied access to the conditions under which these external costs arose in the first place.

The upshot is that lost political leverage can only be regained at the European level. Only then can Jacques Delors' now-faded vision of a "social Europe" become the subject of meaningful political controversy.

A body politic cannot be designed such that the very act of its creation excludes alternatives to the prevailing market liberalism. However, the question of cautious harmonization of tax and economic policy and the gradual assimilation of social security systems within the EU touches on the contentious issues of deepening and widening that have crippled the union for years.

The governments' embarrassed silence over Europe's future conceals the fundamental conflict raging over the bloc's direction, a debate which robs European unification of its vision and appeal. Should Europe become a pro-active force, shaping policy at home and playing a greater role abroad? Or should its role focus more on ongoing expansion, thus encouraging improvements within neighboring countries that seek to join?

The price of this diffuse expansion project is a lack of political leverage in a global society that, while economically tightly knit, has been drifting apart politically since 2001. One only has to look at the miserable images of petty princes Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, as they kowtow to US President George W. Bush, to realize that Europe is bidding adieu to the world stage.

But the problems of climate change, the extreme gaps between rich and poor, the global economic order, the violation of fundamental human rights and the struggle over dwindling energy resources affect everyone equally. Even as the world becomes increasingly interdependent, the global political stage is home to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and an increased willingness to turn to violence. Isn't it in the interest of a politically strong Europe to push for the constitutionalization of international law and an effective cooperation of the international community?

Europe, though, is unable to achieve political significance commensurate with its economic importance, precisely because its governments disagree over the purpose of European unification. Where the blame lies is clear. First and foremost, it can be pinned on the fact that governments themselves are at a loss -- and are thus spreading the malaise of a lackadaisical and morose "more of the same" attitude.

Naturally, the fundamental conflict over direction derives its explosive force from deeper-seated, historically-rooted differences. There are not grounds for criticism of any particular country. But in the wake of the Irish signal, we should expect two things from our governments. They must admit that they are at their wits' end. And they cannot continue to suppress their crippling dissent. In the end, they are left with no choice but to allow the peoples to decide for themselves.

This means that politicians have to roll up their sleeves to ensure that Europe becomes a critical topic of debate across the continent. Should a Europe that has regressed to nation state bickering transform itself into an entity capable of action on both a domestic and international scale?

One proposal to save the Lisbon Treaty is to offer the Irish a partial withdrawal from the European Union. This, at least, takes the decision of Irish voters seriously -- even though that was likely not the Irish intent. The mere mention of such an option sends the right message, however. A cooperative treaty with member states that wish to be temporarily relieved of the obligation to take part in certain institutions could help Europe move beyond the malaise.

The European train has come a long way, despite allowing the slowest member to determine overall speed. But from now on that is the wrong tempo. Even German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble's proposal that Europeans be allowed to directly elect an EU president goes well beyond the timid Lisbon Treaty. The European Council should take the plunge and tie a referendum to European elections next year.

The wording of the referendum would have to be sufficiently clear to allow voters to reach a decision on the EU's future direction. And all European citizens should cast their ballots on the same day, using the same procedure and on the same issue -- all across the continent. One of the shortcomings of referenda to date has been that the formation of opinion has remained stuck in individual national contexts.

With luck and commitment, a two-speed Europe could emerge from such a vote -- if the countries where the referendum is accepted joined forces to cooperate more closely in the areas of foreign, security, economic and social policy.

Were they confronted with an alternative, also those recently acceded countries in central and south-eastern Europe would seriously reflect on where their interests lie. And for skeptical member states, a politically successful core Europe could generate additional appeal. Finally, an internal differentiation -- as legally difficult as it may be -- could facilitate the controversial enlargement of the union.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

from here

Link courtesy of Thomas Gregersen

Notes on a post-secular society

2008-06-19T00:53:00.001+10:00

Both religious and secular mentalities must be open to a complementary learning process if we are to balance shared citizenship and cultural difference.

By Jürgen Habermas

A "post-secular" society must at some point have been in a "secular" state. The controversial term can therefore only be applied to the affluent societies of Europe or countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where people's religious ties have steadily or rather quite dramatically lapsed in the post-War period. These regions have witnessed a spreading awareness that their citizens are living in a secularized society. In terms of sociological indicators, the religious behavior and convictions of the local populations have by no means changed to such an extent as to justify labeling these societies "post-secular". Here, trends towards de-institutionalized and new spiritual forms of religiosity have not offset the tangible losses by the major religious communities.(1)

Reconsidering the sociological debate on secularization

Nevertheless, global changes and the visible conflicts that flare up in connection with religious issues give us reason to doubt whether the relevance of religion has waned. An ever smaller number of sociologists now support the hypothesis, and it went unopposed for a long time, that there is close linkage between the modernization of society and the secularization of the population.(2) The hypothesis rests on three initially plausible considerations.

First, progress in science and technology promotes an anthropocentric understanding of the 'disenchanted' world because the totality of empirical states and events can be causally explained; and a scientifically enlightened mind cannot be easily reconciled with theocentric and metaphysical worldviews. Second, with the functional differentiation of social subsystems, the churches and other religious organizations lose their control over law, politics, public welfare, education and science; they restrict themselves to their proper function of administering the means of salvation, turn exercising religion into a private matter and in general loose public influence and relevance. Finally, the development from agrarian through industrial to post-industrial societies leads in average-to-higher levels of welfare and greater social security; and with a reductions of risks in life, and the ensuing increase in existential security, there is a drop in the personal need for a practice that promises to cope with uncontrolled contingencies through faith in a 'higher' or cosmic power.

These were the main reasons for the secularization thesis. Among the expert community of sociologists, the thesis has been a subject of controversy for more than two decades.(3) Lately, in the wake of the not unfounded criticism of a narrow Eurocentric perspective, there is even talk of the 'end of the secularization theory'.(4) The United States, with the undiminished vibrancy of its religious communities and the unchanging proportion of religiously committed and active citizens, nevertheless remains the spearhead of modernization. It was long regarded as the great exception to the secularising trend, yet informed by the globally extended perspective on other cultures and world religions, the United States now seems to exemplify the norm.

From this revisionist view, the European development, whose Occidental rationalism was once supposed to serve as a model for the rest of the world, is actually the exception rather than the norm – treading a deviant path. We and not they are pursuing a sonderweg. (5) Above all, three overlapping phenomena converge to create the impression of a worldwide 'resurgence of religion': the missionary expansion (a), a fundamentalist radicalisation (b), and the political instrumentalisation of the potential for violence innate in many of the world religions (c).

(a) A first sign of their vibrancy is the fact that orthodox, or at least conservative, groups within the established religious organizations and churches are on the advance everywhere. This holds for Hinduism and Buddhism just as much as it does for the three monotheistic religions. Most striking of all is the regional spread of these established religions in Africa and in the countries of East and Southeast Asia. The missionary successes apparently depends, among other things, on the flexibility of the corresponding forms of organization. The transnational and multicultural Roman Catholic Church is adapting better to the globalizing trend than are the Protestant churches, which are nationally organized and the principal losers. Most dynamic of all are the decentralised networks of Islam (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa) and the Evangelicals (particularly in Latin America). They stand out for an ecstatic form of religiosity inspired by charismatic leaders.

(b) As to fundamentalism, the fastest-growing religious movements, such as the Pentecostals and the radical Muslims, can be most readily described as 'fundamentalist'. They either combat the modern world or withdraw from it into isolation. Their forms of worship combine spiritualism and adventism with rigid moral conceptions and literal adherence to the holy scriptures. By contrast, the 'new age movements' which have mushroomed since the 1970s exhibit a 'Californian' syncretism; they share with the Evangelicals a de-institutionalized form of religious observance. In Japan, approximately 400 such sects have arisen, which combine elements of Buddhism and popular religions with pseudoscientific and esoteric doctrines. In the People's Republic of China, the political repression of the Falun Gong sect has highlighted the large number of 'new religions' whose followers are thought to number some 80 million. (6)

(c) Finally, the mullah regime in Iran and Islamic terrorism are merely the most spectacular examples of a political unleashing of the potential for violence innate in religion. Often smouldering conflicts that are profane in origin are first ignited once coded in religious terms. This is true of the 'desecularisation' of the Middle East conflict, of the politics of Hindu nationalism and the enduring conflict between India and Pakistan (7) and of the mobilisation of the religious right in the United States before and during the invasion of Iraq.

The descriptive account of a "post-secular society" – and the normative issue of how citizens of such a society should understand themselves

I cannot discuss in detail the controversy among sociologists concerning the supposed sonderweg of the secularized societies of Europe in the midst of a religiously mobilized world society. My impression is that the data collected globally still provides surprisingly robust support for the defenders of the secularization thesis.(8) In my view the weakness of the theory of secularization is due rather to rash inferences that betray an imprecise use of the concepts of 'secularization' and 'modernization'. What is true is that in the course of the differentiation of functional social systems, churches and religious communities increasingly confined themselves to their core function of pastoral care and had to renounce their competencies in other areas of society. At the same time, the practice of faith also withdrew into more a personal or subjective domain. There is a correlation between the functional specification of the religious system and the individualisation of religious practice.

However, as Jose Casanova correctly points out, the loss of function and the trend towards individualization do not necessarily imply that religion loses influence and relevance either in the political arena and the culture of a society or in the personal conduct of life.(9) Quite apart from their numerical weight, religious communities can obviously still claim a 'seat' in the life of societies that are largely secularized. Today, public consciousness in Europe can be described in terms of a 'post-secular society' to the extent that at present it still has to "adjust itself to the continued existence of religious communities in an increasingly secularized environment".(10) The revised reading of the secularization hypothesis relates less to its substance and more to the predictions concerning the future role of 'religion'. The description of modern societies as "post-secular" refers to a change in consciousness that I attribute primarily to three phenomena.

First, the broad perception of those global conflicts that are often presented as hinging on religious strife changes public consciousness. The majority of European citizens do not even need the presence of intrusive fundamentalist movements and the fear of terrorism, defined in religious terms, to make them aware of their own relativity within the global horizon. This undermines the secularistic belief in the foreseeable disappearance of religion and robs the secular understanding of the world of any triumphal zest. The awareness of living in a secular society is no longer bound up with the certainty that cultural and social modernisation can advance only at the cost of the public influence and personal relevance of religion.

Second, religion is gaining influence not only worldwide but also within national public spheres. I am thinking here of the fact that churches and religious organisations are increasingly assuming the role of "communities of interpretation" in the public arena of secular societies.(11) They can attain influence on public opinion and will formation by making relevant contributions to key issues, irrespective of whether their arguments are convincing or objectionable. Our pluralist societies constitute a responsive sounding board for such interventions because they are increasingly split on value conflicts requiring political regulation. Be it the dispute over the legalisation of abortion or voluntary euthanasia, on the bioethical issues of reproductive medicine, questions of animal protection or climate change – on these and similar questions the divisive premises are so opaque that it is by no means settled from the outset which party can draw on the more convincing moral intuitions.

Pushing the issue closer home, let me remind you that the visibility and vibrancy of foreign religious communities also spur the attention to the familiar churches and congregations. The Muslims next door force the Christian citizens to face up to the practice of a rival faith. And they also give the secular citizens a keener consciousness of the phenomenon of the public presence of religion.

The third stimulus for a change of consciousness among the population is the immigration of "guest-workers" and refugees, specifically from countries with traditional cultural backgrounds. Since the 16th century, Europe has had to contend with confessional schisms within its own culture and society. In the wake of the present immigration, the more blatant dissonances between different religions link up with the challenge of a pluralism of ways of life typical of immigrant societies. This extends beyond the challenge of a pluralism of denominations. In societies like ours which are still caught in the painful process of transformation into postcolonial immigrant societies, the issue of tolerant coexistence between different religious communities is made harder by the difficult problem of how to integrate immigrant cultures socially. While coping with the pressure of globalized labor markets, social integration must succeed even under the humiliating conditions of growing social inequality. But that is a different story.

I have thus far taken the position of a sociological observer in trying to answer the question of why we can term secularized societies "post-secular". In these societies, religion maintains a public influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernisation is losing ground. If we henceforth adopt the perspective of participants, however, we face a quite different, namely normative question: How should we see ourselves as members of a post-secular society and what must we reciprocally expect from one another in order to ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states, social relations remain civil despite the growth of a plurality of cultures and religious world views?

All European societies today face this question. While preparing this lecture last February, a single weekend offered me three different news items. President Sarkozy dispatched an additional 4,000 policemen to the infamous Parisian banlieus, so sorely afflicted by rioting Maghreb youths; the Archbishop of Canterbury recommended that the British legislature adopt parts of Sharia family law for its local Muslim population; and a fire broke out in a tenement block in Ludwigshafen in which nine Turks, four of them children, met their deaths – something that despite the lack of evidence of arson prompted deep suspicion among the Turkish media, not to say true dismay; this then persuaded the Turkish prime minster to make a visit to Germany during which his ambivalent campaign speech in an arena in Cologne in turn triggered a strident response in the German press.

These debates have assumed a sharper tone since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the Netherlands the murder of Theo van Gogh kindled a passionate public discourse, as did the affair with the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark. These debates assumed a quality of their own (12); their ripples have spread beyond national borders to unleash a European-wide debate.(13) I am interested in the background assumptions that render this discussion on "Islam in Europe" so explosive. But before I can address the philosophical core of the reciprocal accusations, let me outline more clearly the shared starting point of the opposing parties – a proper interpretation of what we are used to call "the separation of church and state".

From an uneasy modus vivendi to a balance between shared citizenship and cultural difference

The secularization of the state was the appropriate response to the confessional wars of early modernity. The principle of "separating church and state" was only gradually realised and took a different form in each national body of law. To the extent that the government assumed a secular character, step by step the religious minorities (initially only tolerated) received further rights – first the freedom to practice their own religion at home, then the right of religious expression and finally equal rights to exercise their religion in public. An historical glance at this tortuous process, and it reached into the 20th century, can tell us something about the preconditions for this precious achievement, the inclusive religious freedom that is extended to all citizens alike.

After the Reformation, the state initially faced the elementary task of having to pacify a society divided along confessional lines, in other words to achieve peace and order. In the context of the present debate, Dutch writer Margriet de Moor reminds her fellow citizens of these beginnings: "Tolerance is often mentioned in the same breath as respect, yet our tolerance, and its roots date back to the 16th and 17th centuries, is not based on respect – on the contrary. We hated the religion of the respective other, Catholics and Calvinist had not one iota of respect for the views of the other side, and our Eighty Years' War was not just a rebellion against Spain, but also a bloody jihad by the orthodox Calvinists against Catholicism."(14) We will soon see what kind of respect Margriet de Moor has in mind.

As regards peace and order, governments had to assume a neutral stand even where they remained bound up with the religion prevailing in the country. In countries with confessional strife the state had to disarm the quarreling parties, invent arrangements for a peaceful coexistence of the inimical confessions and monitor their precarious existence alongside each other. In confessionally split countries like Germany or the Netherlands, the opposing sub-cultures then each nested in niches of their own and subsequently remained foreign to one another in society. Precisely this modus vivendi (and this is what I would like to stress) proved to be insufficient when the constitutional revolutions of the late 18th century spawned a new political order that subjected the completely secularized powers of the state to both the rule of law and the democratic will of the people.

This constitutional state is only able to guarantee its citizens equal freedom of religion under the proviso that they no longer barricade themselves within their religious communities and seal themselves off from one another. All subcultures, whether religious or not, are expected to free their individual members from their embrace so that these citizens can mutually recognize one another in civil society as members of one and the same political community. As democratic citizens they give themselves laws which grant them the right, as private citizens, to preserve their identity in the context of their own particular culture and worldview. This new relationship of democratic government, civil society and subcultural self-maintenance is the key to correctly understanding the two motives that today struggle with each other although they are meant to be mutually complementary. For the universalist project of the political Enlightenment by no means contradicts the particularist sensibilities of a correctly conceived multiculturalism.

The liberal rule of law already guarantees religious freedom as a basic right, meaning that the fate of religious minorities no longer depends on the benevolence of a more or less tolerant state authority. Yet it is the democratic state that first enables the impartial application of this principled religious freedom.(15) When Turkish communities in Berlin, Cologne or Frankfurt seek to get their prayer houses out of the backyards in order to build mosques visible from afar, the issue is no longer the principle per se, but its fair application. However, evident reasons for defining what should or should not be tolerated can only be ascertained by means of the deliberative and inclusive procedures of democratic will formation. The principle of tolerance is first freed of the suspicion of expressing mere condescension, when the conflicting parties meet as equals in the process of reaching an agreement with one another.(16) How the lines between positive freedom of religion (i.e., the right to exercise your own faith) and the negative freedom (i.e., the right to be spared the religious practices of people of other faiths) should be drawn in an actual case is always a matter of controversy. But in a democracy those affected, however indirectly, are themselves involved in the decision making process.

"Tolerance" is of course not only a question of enacting and applying laws; it must be practiced in everyday life. Tolerance means that believers of one faith, of a different faith and non-believers must mutually concede one another the right to those convictions, practices and ways of living that they themselves reject. This concession must be supported by a shared basis of mutual recognition from which repugnant dissonances can be overcome. This recognition should not be confused with an appreciation of an alien culture and way of living, or of rejected convictions and practices.(17) We need tolerance only vis-a-vis worldviews that we consider wrong and vis-a-vis habits that we do not like. Therefore, the basis of recognition is not the esteem for this or that charateristic or achievement, but the awareness of the fact that the other is a member of an inclusive community of citizens with equal rights, in which each individual is accountable to the others for his political contributions.(18)

Now that is easier said than done. The equal inclusion of all citizens in civil society requires not only a political culture that preserves liberal attitudes from being confused with indifference; inclusion can only be achieved if certain material conditions are met. These include full integration and compensatory education in kindergartens, schools and universities, and equal opportunities in access to the labor market. However, in the present context what is most important to me, is the image of an inclusive civil society in which equal citizenship and cultural difference complement each other in the right way.

For example, as long as a considerable portion of German citizens of Turkish origin and of Muslim faith have stronger political ties to their old homeland than their new one, those corrective votes will be lacking in the public sphere and at the ballot boxes which are necessary to expand the range of values of the dominant political culture. Without the inclusion of minorities in civil society, the two complementary processes will not be able to develop hand in hand, namely the opening of the political community to a difference-sensitive inclusion of foreign minority cultures, on the one hand, and on the other, the reciprocal opening of these subcultures to a state where they encourage their individual members participate in the political life at large.

Kulturkampf between radical multiculturalism and militant secularism: philosophical background assumptions

In order to answer the question of how we should understand ourselves as members of a post-secular society, we can take our cue from these two interlocking processes. The ideological parties that confront each other in public debates today seldom take any notice of how both processes fit each other. The party of the multiculturalists appeals to the protection of collective identities and accuses the other side of representing a "fundamentalism of the Enlightenment", whereas the secularists insist on the uncompromising inclusion of minorities in the existing political framework and accuse their opponents of a "multiculturalist betrayal" of the core values of the Enlightenment. In some European countries a third party plays a major role in these battles.

The so-called multiculturalists fight for an unprejudiced adjustment of the legal system to the cultural minorities' claim to equal treatment. They warn against a policy of enforced assimilation with uprooting consequences. The secular state, they say, should not push through the incorporation of minorities into the egalitarian community of citizens in such a manner that it tears individuals out of their identity-forming contexts. From this communitarian view, a policy of abstract integration is under suspicion of subjecting minorities to the imperatives of the majority culture. Today, the wind is blowing in the multiculturalists' faces: "Not only academics, but politicians and newspaper columnists likewise consider the Enlightenment a fortress to be defended against Islamic extremism."(19) This reaction, in turn, brings a critique of a "fundamentalism of the Enlightenment" into play. For example, Timothy Garton Ash argues in the New York Review of Books (Oct. 5, 2006) that "even Muslim women contradict the way in which Hirsi Ali attributes her oppression to Islam instead of the respective national, regional or tribal culture."(20) In fact, Muslim immigrants cannot be integrated into Western society in defiance of their religion but only with it.

On the other hand, the secularists fight for a color-blind inclusion of all citizens, irrespective of their cultural origin and religious belonging. This side warns against the consequences of a "politics of identity" that goes too far in adapting the legal system to the claims of preserving the intrinsic characteristics of minority cultures. From this "laicistic" viewpoint, religion must remain an exclusively private matter. Thus, Pascal Bruckner rejects cultural rights because these would give rise to parallel societies – to "small, self-isolated social groups, each of which adheres to a different norm."(21) Bruckner condemns multiculturalism roundly as an "anti-racist racism", though his attack at best applies to those ultra-minded multiculturalists who advocate the introduction of collective cultural rights. Such protection for entire cultural groups would in fact curtail the right of their individual members to choose a way of life of their own.

Thus the conflicting parties both pretend to fight for the same purpose, a liberal society that allows autonomous citizens to coexist in a civilized manner. And yet they are at loggerheads in a Kulturkampf that resurfaces at every new political occasion. Although it is clear that both aspects are interlinked, they argue bitterly over whether the preservation of cultural identity has priority over the enforcement of shared citizenship or vice versa. The discussion gains its polemical acuity from contradictory philosophical premises which the opponents rightly or wrongly attribute to one other. Ian Buruma has made the interesting observation that following 9/11 an academic debate on the Enlightenment, on modernity and post-modernity, was taken out of the university and floated in the marketplace.(23) The fiery debate was stoked by problematic background assumptions, namely a cultural relativism beefed up with a critique of reason on the one side, and a rigid secularism pushing for a critique of religion on the other.

The radical reading of multiculturalism often relies on the notion of the so-called "incommensurability" of world views, discourses or conceptual schemes. From this contextualist perspective, cultural ways of life appear as semantically closed universes, each of which keeps the lid on its own standards of rationality and truth claims. Therefore, each culture is supposed to exist for itself as a semantically sealed whole, cut off from dialogues with other cultures. With the exception of unsteady compromises, submission or conversion are the only alternatives for terminating conflicts between such cultures. Given this premise, radical multiculturalists cannot discern in any universalist validity claim, such as the claim for the universality of democracy and human rights, anything but the imperialist power claim of a dominant culture.

This relativistic reading inadvertently robs itself of the standards for a critique of the unequal treatment of cultural minorities. In our post-colonial immigrant societies, discrimination against minorities is usually rooted in prevailing cultural prejudices that lead to a selective application of established constitutional principles. If one then does not take seriously the universalist thrust of these principles in the first place, there is no vantage point from which to understand how the constitutional interpretation is bound up with the prejudices of the majority culture. I need not go into the philosophical issue of why cultural relativism, derived from a postmodern critique of reason, is an untenable position.(24) However, the position itself is interesting for another reason; it lends itself to an opposite political conclusion and explains a peculiar political change of sides.

Ironically, the very same relativism is shared by those militant Christians who fight Islamic fundamentalism while proudly claiming the Enlightenment culture either as part and parcel of the tradition of Roman Catholicism or as the specific offshoot of Protestantism. On the other hand, these conservatives have strange bed-fellows, since some of the former leftist "multiculturalists" turned into war-hungry liberal hawks. These converts even joined the ranks of neocon "Enlightenment fundamentalists".(25) In the battle against Islamic fundamentalists they were evidently able to adopt the culture of the Enlightenment, which they had once fought in the name of their own "Western culture" because they had always rejected its universalist intent: "The Enlightenment has become attractive specifically because its values are not just universal, but because they are 'our', i.e., European, Western values." (26)

Needless to say, this reproach does not refer to those "laicistic" intellectuals of French origin for whom the pejorative term "Enlightenment fundamentalists" was originally coined. But it is again a philosophical background assumption which can explain a certain militancy on the part of these truly universalist guardians of the Enlightenment tradition. From their viewpoint, religion must withdraw from the political public sphere into the private domain because, cognitively speaking, it has been historically overridden as an "intellectual formation" ("Gestalt des Geistes", as Hegel puts it). In the light of a liberal constitution, well, religion must be tolerated, but it cannot lay claim to provide a cultural resource for the self-understanding of any truly modern mind.

Complementary learning processes: Religious and secular mentalities

This secularistic position does not depend on how one judges the empirical suggestion that religious citizens and communities still make relevant contributions to political opinion and will formation even in largely secularized societies. Whether or not we consider the application of the predicate "post-secular" appropriate for a description of West European societies, one can be convinced, for philosophical reasons, that religious communities owe their persisting influence to an obstinate survival of pre-Modern modes of thought – a fact, that begs an empirical explanation. From the viewpoint of secularism, the substance of faith is scientifically discredited either way. As such, discussions about religious traditions and with religious figures, who still lay claim to a significant public role, escalate into polemic.

In the use of terms I distinguish between "secular" and "secularist". Unlike the indifferent stance of a secular or unbelieving person, who relates agnostically to religious validity claims, secularists tend to adopt a polemical stance toward religious doctrines that maintain a public influence despite the fact that their claims cannot be scientifically justified. Today, secularism is often based on "hard" naturalism, i.e., one based on scientistic assumptions. Unlike the case of cultural relativism, here I need not comment on the philosophical background.(27) For what interests me in the present context is the question of whether a secularist devaluation of religion, if it were one day to be shared by the vast majority of secular citizens, is at all compatible with that post-secular balance between shared citizenship and cultural difference I have outlined. Or would the secularistic mindset of a relevant portion of the citizenry be just as unappetizing for the normative self-understanding of a post-secular society as the fundamentalist leaning of a mass of religious citizens? This question touches on deeper roots of the present unease than the "multiculturalist drama". Which kind of problem do we face?

It is to the credit of the secularists that they, too, insist on the indispensability of including all citizens as equals in civil society. Because a democratic order cannot simply be imposed on its authors, the constitutional state confronts its citizens with the demanding expectations of an ethics of citizenship that reaches beyond mere obedience to the law. Religious citizens and communities must not only superficially adjust to the constitutional order. They are expected to appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles under the premises of their own faith.(28) It is a well-known fact that the Catholic Church first pinned its colors to the mast of liberalism and democracy with the Second Vaticanum in 1965. And in Germany, the Protestant churches did not act differently. Many Muslim communities still have this painful learning process before them. Certainly, the insight is also growing in the Islamic world that today an historical-hermeneutic approach to the Koran's doctrine is required. But the discussion on a desired Euro-Islam makes us once more aware of the fact that it is the religious communities that will themselves decide whether they can recognize in a reformed faith their "true faith".(29)

When we think of such a shift from the traditional to a more reflexive form of religious consciousness, what springs to mind is the model of the post-Reformation change in epistemic attitudes that took place in the Christian communities of the West. But a change in mentality cannot be prescribed, nor can it be politically manipulated or pushed through by law, it is at best the result of a learning process. And it only appears as a "learning process" from the viewpoint of a secular self-understanding of Modernity. In view of what an ethics of democratic citizenship requires in terms of mentalities, we come up against the very limits of a normative political theory that can justify only rights and duties. Learning processes can be fostered, but not morally or legally stipulated.(30)

But shouldn't we turn the question around? Is a learning process only necessary on the side of religious traditionalism and not on that of secularism, too? Do the selfsame normative expectations that rule an inclusive civil society not prohibit a secularistic devaluation of religion just as they prohibit, for example, the religious rejection of equal rights for men and women? A complementary learning process is certainly necessary on the secular side unless we confuse the neutrality of a secular state in view of competing religious world views with the purging of the political public sphere of all religious contributions.

Certainly, the domain of a state, which controls the means of legitimate coercion, should not be opened to the strife between various religious communities, otherwise the government could become the executive arm of a religious majority that imposes its will on the opposition. In a constitutional state, all norms that can be legally implemented must be formulated and publicly justified in a language that all the citizens understand. Yet the state's neutrality does not preclude the permissibility of religious utterances within the political public sphere, as long as the institutionalized decision-making process at the parliamentary, court, governmental and administrative levels remains clearly separated from the informal flows of political communication and opinion formation among the broader public of citizens. The "separation of church and state" calls for a filter between these two spheres – a filter through which only "translated", i.e., secular contributions may pass from the confused din of voices in the public sphere into the formal agendas of state institutions.

Two reasons speak in favor of such liberal practice. First, the persons who are neither willing nor able to divide their moral convictions and their vocabulary into profane and religious strands must be permitted to take part in political will formation even if they use religious language. Second, the democratic state must not pre-emptively reduce the polyphonic complexity of the diverse public voices, because it cannot know whether it is not otherwise cutting society off from scarce resources for the generation of meanings and the shaping of identities. Particularly with regard to vulnerable social relations, religious traditions possess the power to convincingly articulate moral sensitivities and solidaristic intuitions. What puts pressure on secularism, then, is the expectation that secular citizens in civil society and the political public sphere must be able to meet their religious fellow citizens as equals.

Were secular citizens to encounter their fellow citizens with the reservation that the latter, because of their religious mindset, are not to be taken seriously as modern contemporaries, they would revert to the level of a mere modus vivendi - and would thus relinquish the very basis of mutual recognition which is constitutive for shared citizenship. Secular citizens are expected not to exclude a fortiori that they may discover, even in religious utterances, semantic contents and covert personal intuitions that can be translated and introduced into a secular discourse.

So, if all is to go well both sides, each from its own viewpoint, must accept an interpretation of the relation between faith and knowledge that enables them to live together in a self-reflective manner.

Footnotes

(1) D. Pollack, Säkularisierung – ein moderner Mythos? (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003)

(2) H. Joas, "Gesellschaft, Staat und Religion," in: H. Joas (ed.), Säkularisierung und die Weltreligionen, (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 2007), pp. 9-43

(3) J. Hadden, "Towards desacralizing secularization theory," in: Social Force, vol. 65, 1987, pp. 587-611

(4) H. Joas, op. cit., pp. 9-43

(5) P.L. Berger, in: Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview, (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2005), pp. 1-18

(6) J. Gentz, "Die religiöse Lage in Ostasien," in: Joas (2007), pp. 358-75

(7) cf. the essays by H.G. Kippenberg and H. v. Stietencron in Joas (2007), pp. 465-507 and pp. 194-223

(8) P. Norris & R. Ingelhart, Sacred and Secular. Religion and Politics Worldwide,(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

(9) J.Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, (Chicago, 1994)

(10) J. Habermas, Glauben und Wissen (Frankfurt: special edition of edition Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 13

(11) Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, The Church as a Community of Interpretation, in: D. Browning & F. Schüssler Fiorenza (eds.), Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, (New York: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 66-91

(12) G. Mak, Der Mord an Theo van Gogh. Geschichte einer moralischen Panik, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005)

(13) Th. Chervel & A. Seeliger (ed.), Islam in Europa, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007)

(14) M. de Moor, "Alarmglocken, die am Herzen hängen," in: Chervel & Seeliger (2007), p. 211 (Alarm bells in Muslim hearts)

(15) For the history and a systematic analysis see the comprehensive study by R. Forst, Toleranz im Konflikt, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003)

(16) J. Habermas, "Religiöse Toleranz als Schrittmacher kultureller Rechte," in: my Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 258-78

(17) See my debate with Ch. Taylor, Multikulturalismus und die Politik der Anerkennung, (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1993), in: J. Habermas, "Kampf um Anerkennung im demokratischen Rechtsstaat," in: my Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), pp. 237-76

(18) On the public use of reason see J. Rawls, Politischer Liberalismus (Suhrkamp), Frankfurt/Main 1998, 312-366

(19) I. Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (New York: Atlantic Books, 2006) (Carl Hanser Verlag), München 2006, 34

(20) Timothy Garton Ash in: Chervel & Seeliger (2007), 45f.

(21) P. Bruckner in: Chervel,Seeliger (2007), 67 (Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?)

(22) P. Bruckner, op. cit., p.62: "Multiculturalism guarantees all communities the same treatment, but not the persons who go to make up the communities, because it denies them the freedom to abandon their own traditions." (Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?) See: B. Barry, Culture and Equality, (Cambridge UK: Polity, 2001); and J. Habermas, "Kulturelle Gleichbehandlung und die Grenzen des Postmodernen Liberalismus," in my Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 279-323

(23) Buruma (2006), 34

(24) The decisive critique of the proposed incommensurability goes as far back as D. Davidson’s famous Presidential Address of 1973 “On the very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (deutsch: Was ist eigentlich ein Begriffsschema? in: D. Davidson & R. Rorty, Wozu Wahrheit?, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005, pp. 7-26)

(25) Maybe the new London based Magazine "Standpoint" will become a collecting tank for this heterogenous group of intellectuals

(26) Buruma (2006), p. 34. Buruma describes the motivation of the Leftist converts as follows (p. 123f.): "The Muslims are the spoil-sports who turn up at the party uninvited... Tolerance has its limits even for the progressivists in Holland. It is easy to be tolerant towards those whom we instinctively think we can trust, whose jokes we understand and who share our use of irony... It is far harder to apply this principle to people in our midst who find our way of life as disturbing as we find theirs..."

(27) See the critique in my essays on H.P. Krüher (ed.), Hirn als Subjekt? Philosophische Grenzfragen der Neurobiologie (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007), pp. 101-120 and pp. 263-304

(28) This is the key issue for John Rawls when he calls for an overlapping consensus between groups with different world views to accept the normative substance of the constitutional order: Rawls (1998), pp. 219-64

(29) I. Buruma, "Wer ist Tariq Ramadan," in: Chervel & Seeliger (2007), pp. 88-110; B. Tibi, "Der Euro-Islam als Brücke zwischen Islam und Europa," ibid., pp. 183-99

(30) J. Habermas, Religion in der Öffentlichkeit, in: ders.(2005),119-154

This text originally appeared in German in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, in april 2008. Er lag einem Vortrag zugrunde, den Jürgen Habermas am 15. März 2007 im Rahmen der Veranstaltungen des Nexus Instituts an der Universität Tilburg, Niederlande, gehalten hat.

from here

Habermas on the crisis of the EU

2008-06-18T12:48:00.002+10:00

In "Süddeutsche Zeitung", June 16, 2008, you can read a comment by Jürgen Habermas on the crisis of the EU:

Europa muss eigenständig werden – für die "Wiedergeburt" des Kontinents warb der Philosoph und Soziologe Jürgen Habermas 2003, nach dem Irak-Krieg, mit dem französischen Philosophen Jacques Derrida. Nach dem Nein der Iren zum Lissabon-Vertrag redet der 78-jährige Intellektuelle den Regierungen und Parteien ins Gewissen: Sie müssen Europa zu einem lebenswichtigen Thema auf den Marktplätzen machen.

article here

Link courtesy of Thomas Gregersen

Habermas and Postmodernism

2008-06-15T14:18:00.002+10:00

A reader writes:

"I was looking at some posts on your blog and I was wondering if I could ask you a very elementary question about Habermas. (I'm writing a book on American multiculturalism and I have a chapter on "postmodern multiculturalism.")

My question is what the objection would be to putting Habermas under the heading of "postmodernism." I realize this is a crude question - and I confess I know almost nothing about Habermas (and I realize postmodern is a crude term).

By "postmodernist" all I mean is:
1) begins from diversity of cultural worldviews; sense of problem of relativity of truth-claims; sense that human understanding is derivative from culture and, hence, from politics/struggle
2) the "usual suspects" of those lumped under this category (many protesting of course): Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, Fish.

My sense is that Habermas would NOT be considered a postmodern - even though (as your blog suggests) there is a lot of overlap. My sense that H would NOT be considered a postmodernist is based on 2 crude facts:

1) his attempt to sketch an ethics [or is communicative ethics precisely a kind of attempt at an ethics on postmodernist assumptions?]
2) his overtures to Rawls

And so you see my judgement is based on very crude grounds - and (to repeat) on almost no actual understanding of Habermas.

I am only looking for a general reaction to my question - and I would be grateful for any response that might tell me whether to look into Habermas as a postmodernist (which from your blog it looks like you might be inclined to say?) or continue to assume that Habermas stands outside the camp of postmodernists as much as someone like Rawls would (tho on different grounds).

I'd be much obliged to hear whatever you might have time to say about this."

==

My response:

I have never considered Habermas a postmodernist but he has this remarkable tendency to not only learn from his adversaries but also in a sense overstates their case (and accepts it). He then moves on to defend his own position given the valid (even over exaggerated) critique of his adversaries. What Haberams accepts from the so called postmodernists is their critique of the philosophy of subject. The critique of the philosophy of subject can mean different things for different people but in this context I take it to be a critique of the notion of rationality which locates rational standards outside space and time, in other words outside "this" world. Habermas accepts this critique of otherworldly notions of rationality which linger on in modern and late modern philosophy. However, from the above Habermas doesn’t draw the conclusions which are drawn by most postmodernists. Specifically, Habermas doesn’t accept the claim that with the demise of the philosophy of subject all hope for "objective" standards of rationality is gone and we are ensnared in the immanence of our own worldviews. In Habermas' view a this-worldly "transcendence from within" is possible. For this Habermas develops his theory of communicative rationality which is based on his views of linguistic communication. Habermas thinks that a look at linguistic communicative action aimed at mutual understanding can give us access to criteria that are this worldly (since there is no supposition of a subject located outside space and time, language is a thing of this world), shared by every human being (since we are linguistic beings). These rationality criteria can help us overcome parochialism into which postmodernism inevitably leads. Thus we can defend a version of universalism and objectivity even after we have given up the philosophy of subject. This is Habermas' position anyway!

Any further thoughts from dear readers are most welcome!
[cross posted at FR]

Habermas spoke on 'post-secularism' in Turkey

2008-06-14T15:46:00.001+10:00

From "Turkish Daily News”, June 10, 2008

Secularism, Islam and democracy became the main topics of a series of panels at Bilgi University last week drawing top names from the world's political science and philosophy departments.

The meeting was co-hosted by Rome-based think tank, Reset's "Dialogues on Civilizations" which takes place annually in an effort to promote a network of cultural, intellectual and academic relationships for mutual understanding and interaction among democratic intellectuals and opinion makers belonging to different geo-political and cultural areas of the “East” and the “West.”

The list of distinguished guests and panelists included world-renowned philosopher and author, Jürgen Habermas, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, Andrew March, scholar and professor at Boston College known for his work on Islam and Democracy, David Rasmussen, Islamic thinker and author, Abdlmajid Charfi, Agos editor-in-chief, Etyen Mahçupyan, and Murat Belge among many others.

Below is an excerpt of the speech given by Habermas, a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. His work has focused on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics. The paper he presented was first prepared for the annual Nexus lecture at the University of Tilburg, The Netherlands, March 15, 2007, titled: “What do we mean by ‘post-secular' society?”

"Whether or not we consider the application of the predicate “post-secular” appropriate for a description of West European societies, one can be convinced, for philosophical reasons, that religious communities owe their persisting influence to an obstinate survival of pre-Modern modes of thought – a fact, that begs an empirical explanation. From the viewpoint of secularism, the substance of faith is scientifically discredited either way. On this side the status of religious traditions as not being worth of any serious concern provokes a polemical attitude against religious persons and organizations who still lay claim to a significant public role.

In the use of terms I distinguish between “secular” and “secularist”. Unlike the indifferent stance of a secular or unbelieving person, who relates agnostically to religious validity claims, secularists tend to adopt a polemical stance toward religious doctrines that maintain a public influence despite the fact that their claims cannot be scientifically justified. Today, secularism is often based on “hard” naturalism, i.e., one based on scientistic assumptions. Unlike the case of cultural relativism, this time I need not comment on the philosophical background. For what interests me in the present context is the question whether a secularist devaluation of religion, if it were one day to be shared by the vast majority of secular citizens, is at all compatible with that post-secular balance between shared citizenship and cultural difference I have outlined. Or would the secularistic mindset of a relevant portion of the citizenry be just as appetizing for the normative self-understanding of a post-secular society as the fundamentalism of a mass of religious citizens in fact is? This question touches on deeper roots of the present unease than the “multiculturalist drama”. Which kind of problem do we face?

It is to the credit of the secularists that they, too, insist on the indispensability of including all citizens as equals in civil society. Because a democratic order cannot simply be imposed on those who are its authors, the constitutional state confronts its citizens with the demanding expectations of an ethics of citizenship that reaches beyond mere obedience to the law. Religious citizens and communities must not only superficially adjust to the constitutional order. They are expected to appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles under the very premises of their own faith. It is a well-known fact that the Catholic Church first pinned its colors to the mast of liberalism and democracy with the Second Vaticanum in 1965. And in Germany, the Protestant churches did not act differently. Many Muslim communities still have this painful learning process before them. Certainly, the insight is also growing in the Islamic world that today an historical-hermeneutic approach to the Koran's doctrine is required. But the discussion on a desired Euro-Islam makes us once more aware of the fact that it is the religious communities that will themselves decide whether they can recognize in a reformed faith their “true faith”.

[....]

Without doubt, the domain of a state which controls the means of legitimate coercion may not be opened to the strife between various religious communities, as otherwise the government could become the executive arm of a religious majority that imposes its will on the opposition. In a constitutional state, all norms that can be legally pushed through must be formulated and publicly justified in a language that all the citizens understand. Yet the state's neutrality does not preclude the permissibility of religious utterances within the political public sphere as long as the institutionalized decision-making process at the parliamentary, court, governmental and administrative levels remains clearly separated from the informal flows of political communication and opinion formation among the broader public of citizens. The “separation of church and state” calls for a filter between these two spheres – a filter through which only “translated”, i.e., secular contributions may pass from the confused din of voices in the public sphere onto the formal agendas of state institutions."

Thomas Gregersen

from Habermas Forum

Levinas, Habermas and modernity

2008-06-14T15:32:00.000+10:00

Levinas, Habermas and modernity
Nicholas H. Smith
Macquarie University, Australia

This article examines Levinas as if he were a participant in what Habermas has called `the philosophical discourse of modernity'. It begins by comparing Levinas' and Habermas' articulations of the philosophical problems of modernity. It then turns to how certain key motifs in Levinas' later work give philosophical expression to the needs of the times as Levinas diagnoses them. In particular it examines how Levinas interweaves a modern, post-ontological conception of `the religious' or `the sacred' into his account of subjectivity. Finally, the article looks at some problems that arise for Levinas once his position in the philosophical discourse on modernity is made explicit.

Key Words: Jürgen Habermas • Emmanuel Levinas • modernity • ontology • otherness • religion • social relation

Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental

2008-05-18T14:09:00.000+10:00

Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
R. Matthew Shockey
Indiana University, South Bend, USA

Cristina Lafont's recent reading of Heidegger offers a powerful formulation of the widespread view that once one recognizes our `facticity' and the role of language in shaping it, there is no room left to talk about transcendental structures of meaning or experience. In this article I challenge this view. I argue that Lafont inaccurately conflates what Heidegger calls our `understanding of being' with that which language discloses. In order to show that the philosophical motivation for this conflation is unsound, I also argue that Lafont's own positive theory of meaning itself tacitly assumes a distinction between factical and transcendental, and so rests on exactly what she finds problematic in Heidegger. This still leaves a puzzle as to how factical individuals are actually able to grasp anything transcendental, so I conclude by sketching Heidegger's method of `formal indication', which is meant to show precisely how this can be done.

Key Words: facticity • Martin Heidegger • language • transcendental philosophy

from here

On the psychogenesis of the a priori

2008-05-18T14:08:00.000+10:00

On the psychogenesis of the a priori
Jean Piaget's critique of Kant
Horst Pfeiffle
Vienna Institute of Economics and Business Administration

The seal of the a priori is imprinted on the reception of Kant's philosophy. Piaget's epistemological argumentation seems to ascribe knowledge a more fruitful constructiveness than Kant, seeing the a priori as rooted in unvarying reason. Yet, it seems, he failed to recognize the complexity of Kant's theory, which does not always follow a quid iuris line. Moments of experience, analysis and self-observation played more than a marginal role in his discovery of the a priori. Indeed, Kant himself raises the question of ontogenetic category assimilation in a review which pre-empts Piaget, borrowing the category of `original acquisition' from the doctrine of the laws of natural right. And although Kant should not be elevated to the harbinger of the knowledge on development issues delivered thus far by the history of science and experiments, he did recognize the temporal reference of their categories in principle without resolving their validity in psychogenetic terms.

Key Words: a priori • categories • genetic epistemology • Geneva School • neo-Kantianism • original acquisition • Jean Piaget • psychogenesis • self-observation

from here

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory

2008-05-16T09:32:00.001+10:00

Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Columbia University Press, 2008, 230pp., $34.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780231136228.

Reviewed by J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Hartwick College

In her recent book, Amy Allen tackles one of the persistent problems of post-Foucaultian critical theory: how can we acknowledge the pervasive mechanisms of power in the formation of our identities, and yet still allow for an ideal of autonomous action? This problem -- one that has been a sticking point in the discussion between Foucaultians and Habermasians -- has also come to be an issue of much importance in the feminist literature. The Politics of Our Selves is a persuasive and well-reasoned account of how we might find our way through some difficult -- some might say 'intractable' -- problems of contemporary feminism and critical theory. The book demonstrates that the perceived opposition between power and knowledge is something of a red herring. Recognizing this, moreover, has important consequences for some of feminism's most serious debates -- as well as for understanding the appropriate parameters of a critical theory.

The Politics of Our Selves begins by rethinking the Foucault/Habermas debate -- a debate that centers on the place of critique in the network of power. In reading Foucault's work, where power 'is everywhere' and is that in virtue of which agents are constructed and placed within systems of normalization and subordination, a persistent worry seems to arise: if power is absolutely everywhere, how is it possible to engage in the critique of power in such a way that we might (at least partially) liberate ourselves from the oppressive aspects of power? If power pervades everything, it follows that it pervades rationality, and hence that the use of rationality itself is riddled with the very means of subordination we are trying to overcome. It is precisely this criticism that has been leveled against the Foucaultian enterprise by philosophers like Habermas and Charles Taylor.

full here

Vote for Habermas for "The Top 100 Public Intellectuals"

2008-05-09T22:34:00.001+10:00

Habermas makes the top 100 list (details here). Vote for Habermas here.

New book on Habermas and religion

2008-04-27T00:15:00.003+10:00

A new book on Habermas’ recent view on religion has just been published on ”Suhrkamp Verlag”:

Michael Reder & Josef Schmidt (eds.) - ”Ein Bewusstsein von dem, was fehlt. Eine Diskussion mit Jürgen Habermas”.

The book has two short contributions by Habermas.

Contents:

1. Michael Reder and Josef Schmidt – ”Habermas und die Religion” (pp. 9-25)

2. Jürgen Habermas – ”Ein Bewusstsein von dem, was fehlt” (pp. 26-36) [from ”Neue Zürcher Zeitung” February 10, 2007]

3. Norbert Brieskorn – ”Vom Versuch, eine Beziehung wieder bewusstzumachen” (pp. 37-50)

4. Michael Reder – ”Wie weit können Glaube und Vernunft unterschieden werden?” (pp. 51-68)

5. Friedo Ricken – ”Nachmetaphysische Vernunft und Religion” (pp. 69-78)

6. Josef Schmidt – ”Ein Dialog, in dem es nur Gewinner geben kann” (pp. 79-93)

7. Jürgen Habermas – ”Eine Replik” (pp. 94-107) [new]

The essays are based on a discussion at "Hochschule für Philosohie", München, January, 2007.

"Mit seiner Friedenspreisrede eröffnete Jürgen Habermas 2001 die Auseinandersetzung mit Vertretern der katholischen Kirche: Er traf sich mit Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger. Unter dem Titel »Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt« führte er nun ein Gespräch mit renommierten Philosophen der Hochschule für Philosophie der Jesuiten. Habermas betont, daß die moderne Vernunft sich selbst nur verstehen könne, wenn sie ihre Stellung zum religiösen Bewußtsein kläre. Hintergrund für seine Argumentation ist u.a. auch die Verhältnisbestimmung von Glaube und Vernunft, die Papst Benedikt XVI. in seiner Regensburger Rede formuliert hatte. Der Band versammelt den Essay sowie die Beiträge der Debatte. Die Einleitung gibt einen Überblick über Habermas’ religionsphilosophische Interventionen."

Information courtesy of Thomas Gregersen

Charles Taylor: Secularism and critique

2008-04-24T23:33:00.001+10:00

"As for Habermas, he has always marked an epistemic break between secular reason and religious thought, with the advantage on the side of the first. Secular reason suffices to arrive at the normative conclusions we need, such as establishing the legitimacy of the democratic state, and defining our political ethic. Recently, his position on religious discourse has considerably evolved; to the point of recognizing that its “Potential macht die religiöse Rede bei entsprechenden politischen Fragen zu einem ernsthaften Kandidaten für mögliche Wahrheitsgehalte.” But the basic epistemic distinction still holds for him. Thus when it comes to the official language of the state, religious references have to be expunged. “Im Parlament muss beispielsweise die Geschäftsordnung den Presidenten ermächtigen, religiöse Stellungnahmen und Rechtfertigungen aus dem Protokoll zu streichen.”

I think that these positions of Rawls and Habermas show that they have not yet understood the normative basis for the contemporary secular state. I believe that they are on to something, in that there are zones of a secular state in which the language used has to be neutral. But these do not include citizen deliberation, as Rawls at first thought, or even deliberation in the legislature, as Habermas seems to think from the above quote. This zone can be described as the official language of the state: the language in which legislation, administrative decrees and court judgments must be couched. It is self-evident that a law before Parliament couldn’t contain a justifying clause of the type: “Whereas the Bible tells us that p.” And the same goes mutatis mutandis for the justification of a judicial decision in the court’s verdict. But this has nothing to do with the specific nature of religious language. It would be equally improper to have a legislative clause: “Whereas Marx has shown that religion is the opium of the people,” or “Whereas Kant has shown that the only thing good without qualification is a good will.” The grounds for both these kinds of exclusions is the neutrality of the state."

full here

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on John Rawls

2008-04-17T14:18:00.003+10:00

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on John Rawls has been published recently (here). Rawls' relevance for Habermas is obvious, though the article doesn't mention Habermas or Habermas-Rawls debate.

Moral Education and Cosmopolitanism

2008-04-16T15:08:00.000+10:00

Kieran Keohane
National University of Ireland, Cork,

The central problem of citizenship and political culture in the `postnational constellation' is the cultivation and institutionalization of cosmopolitanism as a political identity. The cultivation of citizenship in the postnational constellation echoes the problem Durkheim confronted at the turn of the twentieth century, when he faced the task of developing a systematic programme of moral education as a basis for social solidarity in a secular national French republic; a programme that would perform the same functions of social integration previously organized in terms of a religious discourse. While nationalism provided a discourse of political identification throughout the twentieth century, critical theory and psychoanalysis (for example, the Frankfurt School's studies in prejudice and the authoritarian personality) have shown how nationalism has now become a problematic basis for political identification and citizenship. This article explores Habermas's and Beck's present problem through an examination of Kant and Durkheim. It suggests that an appropriate pedagogical model of cosmopolitanism, one that combines elements of transcendental and situated reason, may be found in Joyce's representation of Leopold Bloom; a pedagogical representation wherein transcendental ideals grounded in universal reason are combined with various discursive and communicative encounters with the Other, in cosmopolitanizing experiences of the workplace and organizational life, international travel and migration, and urban neighbourhoods and milieus.

Key Words: cosmopolitanism • Durkheim • Habermas • Joyce • Kant • moral education

from here

Deliberation interrupted: Confronting Jürgen Habermas with Claude Lefort

2008-04-08T02:40:00.000+10:00

Stefan Rummens
University of Leuven, Belgium
Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 4, 383-408 (2008)

In this article I confront Jürgen Habermas' deliberative model of democracy with Claude Lefort's analysis of democracy as a regime in which the locus of power remains an empty place. This confrontation reveals several structural similarities between the two authors and explains how the proceduralization of popular sovereignty provides a discourse-theoretical interpretation of the empty place of power. At the same time, Lefort's insistence on the open-ended nature of the democratic struggle also points towards an unresolved tension at the core of Habermas' model between the cognitive nature of deliberation on the one hand and the freedom of moral and political agents on the other. A proper solution of this tension requires a full appreciation of the ineliminable gap between actual and ideal deliberation. Because actual deliberation can never result in an ideal consensus, the actual exercise of democratic power should be understood as an unavoidable interruption of deliberation.

from here

Dialectics of Secularisation

2008-04-02T02:27:00.002+11:00

"In an article on the "Dialectics of Secularisation," Jürgen Habermas makes a lengthy contribution to the debate launched by signandsight.com and Perlentaucher on Islam in Europe. Habermas sides with neither the 'secularists' nor the 'multiculturalists,' but he does approve of the secularists' "insisting energetically on the absolute essentialness of equal inclusion of all citizens in civil society. ... Religious citizens and religious communities should not only assimilate on the surface level. They must embrace the secular legitimation of the community within the premises of their own belief." But Habermas also demands that the secular side engages in a learning process. One of his arguments: "The democratic state (should) avoid rushing to reduce the polyphonic complexity of the spectrum of public voices because it cannot be certain that this might not sever society from the meagre resources that generate meaning and identity."

from here

orginal article here
also here

Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung

2008-04-02T02:00:00.000+11:00

Von Jürgen Habermas
Der Bischof von Canterbury empfiehlt dem britischen Gesetzgeber, für die einheimischen Muslime Teile des Familienrechts der Scharia zu übernehmen; Präsident Sarkozy schickt 4000 zusätzliche Polizisten in die berüchtigten, von Krawallen algerischer Jugendlicher heimgesuchten Banlieues von Paris; ein Brand in Ludwigshafen, bei dem neun Türken, darunter vier Kinder, umkommen, weckt in den türkischen Medien trotz der ungeklärten Brandursache tiefen Argwohn und wüste Empörung; das veranlasst den türkischen Ministerpräsidenten bei seiner Visite in Deutschland zu einem Besuch der Brandstelle, wobei sein anschließender wenig hilfreicher Auftritt in Köln1 wiederum in der deutschen Presse ein schrilles Echo auslöst. Alle diese Nachrichten stammen von nur einem Wochenende dieses Jahres. Sie dokumentieren, wie sehr der Zusammenhalt innerhalb vermeintlich säkularer Gesellschaften gefährdet ist – und wie drängend sich die Frage stellt, ob und in welchem Sinne wir es inzwischen mit einer postsäkularen Gesellschaft zu tun haben.

Um von einer „postsäkularen“ Gesellschaft sprechen zu können, muss diese sich zuvor in einem „säkularen“ Zustand befunden haben. Der umstrittene Ausdruck kann sich also nur auf die europäischen Wohlstandsgesellschaften oder auf Länder wie Kanada, Australien und Neuseeland beziehen, wo sich die religiösen Bindungen der Bürger kontinuierlich, seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges sogar drastisch gelockert haben. In diesen Regionen hatte sich das Bewusstsein, in einer säkularisierten Gesellschaft zu leben, mehr oder weniger allgemein verbreitet. Gemessen an den üblichen religionssoziologischen Indikatoren haben sich die religiösen Verhaltensweisen und Überzeugungen der einheimischen Bevölkerungen inzwischen keineswegs so verändert, dass sich daraus eine Beschreibung dieser Gesellschaften als „postsäkular“ rechtfertigen ließe. Bei uns können auch die Trends zur Entkirchlichung und zu neuen spirituellen Formen der Religiösität die greifbaren Einbußen der großen Religionsgemeinschaften nicht kompensieren.2

full here

Calhoun on Habermas and religion

2008-03-25T13:25:00.000+11:00

"Rawls’ account of the public use of reason allows for religiously motivated arguments, but not for the appeal to “comprehensive” religious doctrines for justification. Justification must rely solely on “proper political reasons” (which means mainly reasons that are available to everyone regardless of the specific commitments they may have to religion or substantive conceptions of the good or their embeddedness in cultural traditions). This is, as Habermas indicates, an importantly restrictive account of the legitimate public use of reason – one which will strike many as not truly admitting religion into public discourse. Crucially, Habermas follows Wolterstorff in arguing that it is in the nature of religion that serious belief is understood as informing – and rightly informing – all of a believer’s life. This makes sorting out the “properly political” from other reasons both practically impossible in many cases and an illegitimate demand for secularists to impose. Attempting to enforce it would amount to discriminating against those for whom religion is not “something other than their social and political existence”. On more ambiguous grounds, Habermas does hold it acceptable to demand “properly political” justifications, independent of religion, from politicians even if not from those who vote for or endorse them.

Habermas seeks to defend a less narrow liberalism, one that admits religion more fully into public discourse (including both democratic will formation and the rule of law) but seeks to maintain a secular conception of the state. He understands this as requiring impartiality in state relations to those of any religious orientation or none and to all religious communities, but not as requiring the stronger laïc prohibition on state action affecting religion even if impartially. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that the liberal state and its advocates are not merely enjoined to religious tolerance but – at least potentially – cognizant of a functional interest in public expressions of religion. These may be key resources for the creation of meaning and identity; secular citizens can learn from religious contributions to public discourse (not least when these help clarify intuitions the secular have not made explicit)."

full here

Habermas on Dutch anti-Islam film

2008-03-23T14:52:00.003+11:00

On March 15, Jürgen Habermas gave a lecture at the University of Tilburg, the Netherlands, on "The Post-Secular Society. What does it mean?"

After the lecture the audience was interested in what he had to say about an impending anti-Islam film by right-wing parliamentarian Geert Wilders, who has been threatening for some months now to publish a film in which a copy of the Qur'an is burned. Wilders has argued the Qur'an should be banned for inciting hate and violence, and he wants a stop to all immigration from non-western countries.

When Habermas was asked to speak about Geert Wilders' phantom film, he said one should first distinguish between the constitutional or legal issues related to this announcement, on the one hand, and political issues, on the other. "There is nobody in this room who would disagree with the constitutional principle of freedom of press as one of our most important basic rights, which often even trumps other basic rights."

Habermas believes Wilders announced the film in such a way that it is obvious he intends to arouse or polarise public opinion. "It's hard to think this effect is not intended." As for whether there were competing rights that might be violated by the film, Habermas points out such cases often involve libel, harm to third persons, or disruption of public order. "I'm not a lawyer, and this has to be proved purely on legal terms and we hope that both the minister and courts, if it comes to that, handle it correctly."

"My first and only question would be why would you, Mr Wilders, think it is necessary to continue the provocations you had in this country with very severe consequences? This is a totally political question. What is the reason? In 1968 we had students, my own students too, who were systematically violating certain rules for the purpose of provocation."

Citing the older generation's silence about Germany's crimes against humanity at the time and the tabloid press reaction to the shooting death of a student protester, Habermas says: "I think at that time, most of the students had very good reasons to provoke".

Addressing Wilders, Habermas says: "I would ask him for his reasons to make the provocation, presupposing that there is no need for any provocation, if there is no issue which has only now to be brought to public attention. Provocation can be justified in terms of the situation where the issue at stake can only get necessary public attention through this provocation."

(From article by Marijke van der Meer, Radio Nederlands)
=
This info was kindly provided by Thomas Gregersen

A new book by Jürgen Habermas

2008-03-23T14:52:00.001+11:00

Ach Europa. Kleine politische Schriften XI
(Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008). 191 pages (Euro 9.-)

Contents
Vorwort des Autors

(I) Porträts

1. Der Hermann Heller der frühen Bundesrepublik Wolfgang Abendroth zum 100. Geburtstag

2. Richard Rorty und das Entzücken am Schock der Deflationierung – »... and to define America, her athletic democracy«; Im Andenken an Richard Rorty

3. Wie die ethische Frage zu beantworten ist; Derrida und die Religion

4. Derridas klärende Wirkung; Ein letzter Gruß

5. Ronald Dworkin; Ein Solitär im Kreise der Rechtsgelehrten

(II) Ach, Europa

6. Ein avantgardistischer Spürsinn für Relevanzen; Die Rolle des Intellektuellen und die Sache Europas

7. Europa und seine Immigranten

8. Europapolitik in der Sackgasse; Plädoyer für eine Politik der abgestuften Integration

(III) Zur Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit

9. Medie, Märkte und Konsumenten; Die seriöse Presse als Rückgrat der politischen Öffentlichkeit

10. Hat die Demokratie noch eine epistemische Dimension? Empirische Forschung und normative Theorie

Preface by Jürgen Habermas:

”Von Enzensbergers Lobgesang auf die europäische Vielfalt – Ach Europa! – bleibt heute nur noch der seufzende Ton. Eine Diskussion mit Außenminister Frank-Walter Steinmeier gab erneut Anlass, über die Zukunft Europas nachzudenken und der Selbsttäuschung entgegenzutreten, als sei nach dem Gipfel von Lissabon der drohende Rückfall der Europäischen Union in die nur zu bekannten Machtspiele der nationalen Regierungen gebannt. Diese haben bisher den Kurs der europäischen Einigung bestimmt, scheinen aber nun mit ihrem Latein am Ende zu sein. Vielleicht sollten sie das weitere Schicksal Europas in die Hände ihrer Bevölkerungen legen. Im übrigen plädiere ich für eine »bipolare« Gemeinsamkeit des Westens.

Das Hauptthema ergänze ich auf der einen Seite um gelegentlich entstandene »philosophisch-politische Profile«, auf der anderen Seite um zwei Texte zur Rolle der politischen Öffentlichkeit. Insbesondere der letzte Beitrag liegt mir am Herzen. Darin geht es um den strukturierenden Einfluss, den eine normative Theorie der Öffentlichkeit auf die Anlage empirischer Forschungen haben kann. Fachzeitschriften tun sich mit diesem Thema schwer, weil sich Sozialwissenschaften und Philosophie inzwischen weiter voneinander entfernt haben, als es sich die Väter der kritischen Theorie hätten vorstellen können.”

This info was kindly provided by Thomas Gregersen

Habermas and civil religion

2008-03-22T14:33:00.001+11:00

“Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”

[Jürgen Habermas, “Conversation About God and the World,” Time of Transitions, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006,): pgs. 150-151.]

from here

Class, nation and covenant

2008-03-22T02:51:00.001+11:00

"Against this background, the outrage of the right at the prophetic denunciations of the Reverend Wright suddenly appears in a new light. Recall the words that have received the most airtime and sparked the great outrage: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes three-strike laws and wants them to sing God Bless America. No! No No! God damn America … for killing innocent people. God damn America for threatening citizens as less than humans. God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and supreme.” As many of his defenders have noted, this and other statements by Wright statements are wholly within the covenant logic. When the Chosen people violate the covenant, God will punish them. But right-wing patriotism, in its pseudo-Christian and secular variants, does not allow for this possibility. It assumes that America has been chosen once and for all, and that it has a monopoly on God’s blessings.

As E.J. Dionne Jr. notes in a recent editorial in the Washington Post, the rhetoric of Martin Luther King - one of America’s secular saints and its only black one - could be every bit as prophetic in tone as Wright’s. Consider what “King said about the Vietnam War at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968: ‘God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. … And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place.’ King then predicted this response from the Almighty: ‘And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.’”

This is not to imply that all conservative Christians who have allied themselves with the pseudo-Christians and Captain Americas have completely sloughed off the two-way logic of the covenant. None other than Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (in)famously claimed that 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina were divine punishment for Roe v. Wade. However, those who still see the covenant as a two-way transaction, implying both blessings and sufferings, operate with a minimalistic and individualistic version of Christian ethics focused solely on pelvic issues and bereft of prophetic calls for social justice.

The comparison with Falwell and Robertson also reveals another important aspect of crusader nationalism: its Faustian pact with racial divisiveness. Why do conservatives not hold the Falwells and Robertsons and Dobsons of the world to the same standard? Clearly, there is a double standard at work here. It is acceptable for a white preacher to speak in the angry voice of a prophet; it is not acceptable for black preacher to do so. Indeed, this is now the central tactic in the campaign of personal destruction being waged against Barack Obama by the right-wing noise machine: to make him into an “angry, black man.” It’s been road-tested by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. It will be part of the endless loop of the fall campaign."

full here

Can "speech acts" be used strategically?

2008-03-19T00:10:00.003+11:00

"The key idea in Habrmas’s theory of communicative action is that speech acts cannot be planned or executed with entirely strategic intent."

(Communicative Action and Rational Choice, p. 4)

" . . . recent game-theoretic research lends considerable support to Habermas's claim that speech acts cannot be instrumentally rational." (ibid. p. 5).

=
I don't think Habermas has ever claimed that "speech acts" cannot be used strategically! In fact the possibility that speech acts can be used strategically is the very basis of Habermas' distinction between communicative action and strategic actions! Thus we can define strategic action as a type of action coordination where the primary mode of action coordination is non linguistic and where “the speech acts for their parts are subordinated to the exertion of influence or actors who affect one another purposively that the specifically linguistic binding and bonding energies (Bunungsenergien) remain unused.” (OPC: 220-221). In communicative action “the illocutionary forces of speech acts assume an action coordinating role” while in strategic action the illocutionary force of speech acts is not the primary medium of action coordination. The speech acts are subordinated to the intentions and plans of actors and are used only instrumentally or strategically.

a cottage industry of Habermasians . . .

2008-03-18T23:59:00.001+11:00

. . . circuitous mapping of Habermas’s thoughts has created a cottage industry of Habermasians who attempt to make sense out of each new book he writes . . . .

(Communicative action and the radical constitution: the Habermasian challenge
to Hayek, Mises and their descendents, p. 258).

Constellations: An International Journal Of Critical And Democratic Ttheory

2008-03-18T14:51:00.002+11:00

Volume 15 Issue 1 Page 10-32, March 2008 is a free content issue. Enjoy!

Second Call for Papers for the 4th Annual Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy

2008-03-17T16:14:00.001+11:00

The SEP-FEP Joint Conference offers faculty and graduate students the opportunity to present papers in any area of European Philosophy. Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted by 30th May 2008 to Juliana Cardinale, either in electronic form to J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk or by mail to:
Forum for European Philosophy
Room J5, European Institute
Cowdray House, Portugal Street
London School of Economics, London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

In addition to proposals for individual papers (as above) proposals for themed panels of (up to) four speakers on any area of European Philosophy are also invited. If you would like to organise a themed panel please contact Brian O’Connor before 18th April, 2008 at brian.oconnor@ucd.ie.

The conference keynote speakers are:
Françoise Dastur (Nice)
Alessandro Ferrara (Rome)
Michael Rosen (Harvard).

There are also two open plenary sessions led by Maeve Cooke (UCD) (The Possibilities of Critical Theory) and Dermot Moran (UCD) (The Future of Phenomenology)

Neither Hayek nor Habermas

2008-03-12T14:40:00.000+11:00

Cass R. Sunstein University of Chicago Law School, Chicago, USA

Abstract The rise of the blogosphere raises important questions about the elicitation and aggregation of information, and about democracy itself. Do blogs allow people to check information and correct errors? Can we understand the blogosphere as operating as a kind of marketplace for information along Hayekian terms? Or is it a vast public meeting of the kind that Jurgen Habermas describes? In this article, I argue that the blogosphere cannot be understood as a Hayekian means for gathering dispersed knowledge because it lacks any equivalent of the price system. I also argue that forces of polarization characterize the blogosphere as they do other social interactions, making it an unlikely venue for Habermasian deliberation, and perhaps leading to the creation of information cocoons. I conclude by briefly canvassing partial responses to the problem of polarization.

Keywords Hayek - Blogs - Information aggregation - Condorcet Jury Theorem

This essay draws on some discussion by Sunstein (2006). I am very grateful to Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell for suggestions and help.

from here

Communicative action and the radical constitution: the Habermasian challenge to Hayek, Mises and their descendents

2008-03-12T14:25:00.001+11:00

David L. Prychitko and Virgil Henry Storr*
* Northern Michigan University and George Mason University, respectively

Address for correspondence: Dr Virgil Henry Storr, 1714 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington DC 20005; email: vstorr@tsd.biz

This paper evaluates Jurgen Habermas's typology of action and his recent call for a radically democratic rule of law. The theory of action that Habermas develops, however, differs significantly from the science of action (praxeology) of the Austrian school. As such, it represents a methodological challenge to Austrian praxeology. Additionally, Habermas's criticism of the welfare state is shown to be somewhat consistent with Hayek's criticisms, but his alternative to the welfare state challenges the political vision of many Austrian economists. This paper attempts to demonstrate that both Habermas's and the Austrian school's efforts suffer from similar weaknesses and epistemological pretences.

Key Words: Austrian economics • Habermas • Praxeology • Rule of law • Welfare state

from here

Obama a Habermasian or a Rawlsian?

2008-03-11T11:16:00.000+11:00

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all . . . Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

from here

The Israeli “Communicative Action”

2008-03-11T10:58:00.002+11:00

"In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?

When the Palestinians aren’t making claims, their viewpoint is simply not heard. Keshev, the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, studied the way Israel’s leading television channels and newspapers covered Palestinian casualties in a given month – December 2005. They found 48 items covering the deaths of 22 Palestinians. However, in only eight of those accounts was the IDF version followed by a Palestinian reaction; in the other 40 instances the event was reported only from the point of view of the Israeli military.

Another example: in June 2006, four days after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from the Israeli side of the Gazan security fence, Israel, according to the Israeli media, arrested some sixty members of Hamas, of whom 30 were elected members of parliament and eight ministers in the Palestinian government. In a well-planned operation Israel captured and jailed the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, the ministers of finance, education, religious affairs, strategic affairs, domestic affairs, housing and prisons, as well as the mayors of Bethlehem, Jenin and Qalqilya, the head of the Palestinian parliament and one quarter of its members. That these officials were taken from their beds late at night and transferred to Israeli territory probably to serve (like Gilad Shalit) as future bargaining-chips did not make this operation a kidnapping. Israel never kidnaps: it arrests.

. . .

At a time when there were many Israeli raids on Gaza I asked my colleagues the following question: ‘If an armed Palestinian crosses the border, enters Israel, drives to Tel Aviv and shoots people in the streets, he will be the terrorist and we will be the victims, right? However, if the IDF crosses the border, drives miles into Gaza, and starts shooting their gunmen, who is the terrorist and who is the defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make Israel safer. It’s the implementation of a government decision!’ [bold added]

"

full here

Empty formulas for change

2008-03-06T13:28:00.002+11:00

“The broad renunciation of the power of politics to shape social relations, and the readiness to abandon normative points of view in favour of adaptations to supposedly unavoidable systematic imperatives, now dominate the political arena of the Western world. Clinton or Blair, relying on empty formulas such as “It’s time for a change,” pitch themselves as efficient managers for the reorganization of failing business ventures. The truly programmatic that has been whittled down to “political change” corresponds, on the side of voters, either to informed abstinence or the thirst for “political charisma,” . . .” (PNC: 79-80).

I wonder how much of this applies to Barack Obama !!

Habermas and Foucault: Discourse and Modernity

2008-02-28T10:44:00.002+11:00

A Masters dissertation on Foucault and Habermas (download from here)

The Bibliography is here

source: The Schizo-Stroller

Habermas and "Richard Rorty's Philosophical Legacy"

2008-02-25T19:22:00.002+11:00

some interesting discussion is going on here

Steve Fuller's comments are worth reproducing here in full:

"I write as someone who has always had a soft spot for Habermas, with Knowledge and Human Interests being one of the most heavily annotated books from my undergraduate days at Columbia in the late 70s. (I still think that’s his best book.) And of course, for left-of-centre intellectuals, it is hard to fault Habermas on political grounds throughout a long career of public exposure when there were many opportunities to be wrong-footed. And on most philosophical matters, he’s a good place to turn to get a sensible first opinion. But, if we are talking about the Reapolitik of intellectual history, I believe that Rorty will turn out to be seen as a much more original and consequential philosophical figure than Habermas. The reasons for this should be obvious, but philosophers tend to not take them sufficiently seriously.

First, Habermas is a scholastic whose intellectual power comes mainly from his ability to reconcile disparate sources that he doesn’t hide, and which makes his intellectual trajectory easy to chart simply by reading his texts. Of course, the sources informing Habermasian scholasticism have shifted over his career as his centre of gravity migrated across the Atlantic. In contrast, an original thinker is – as one should expect – a person whose origins aren’t so obvious from the textual trace, and hence appears to bring a new sensibility to the philosophical conversation. Rorty fits that bill, since he was trained as a process philosopher, not an analytic or pragmatist philosopher.

To be sure, Habermas’ scholasticism makes him attractive to people who like to learn about other thinkers by reading just one thinker. But scholasticism generally has little staying power unless it is imposed as orthodoxy, Aquinas being the obvious case in point. (Other medieval thinkers called ‘scholastics’ are remembered in a much more fragmentary manner – and for their genuinely original contributions.) It’s not an accidental feature of the sociology of Habermas’ reception that he perhaps enjoys the strongest infrastructure of translators/expositors vis-à-vis that of any other continental European thinker of the postwar period. Scholasticism, with its methodical style and broad coverage, is designed for easy transmission that can be sustained over several generations. The question is whether ‘Habermania’ will ever be anything more than an intellectual cult amongst certain centre-left thinkers.

As for Rorty, my guess that a big part of the hostility to him amongst philosophers is that he has read much more widely than they but he refuses to excuse that deficiency by laying out exactly what it is about X that leads him to categorise or appraise X as he does. You might call this intellectual laziness or cowardice on Rorty’s part – not wanting to expose his own ignorance of the original texts. Or you might simply grant his glosses and make sense of his arguments on their own terms. This involves a judgement call: The potential misuse of sources has to be traded off against the potential illumination of our current philosophical predicament served by it. If the trade off is made in favour of the latter, then Rorty is deemed original. Very few, if any, of the great philosophers read their sources well or accurately, going back to Plato and Aristotle vis-à-vis the sophists. They’re ‘great’ largely because of the influence retrospectively attributed to them, which has to do with their ability to illuminate successive generations.

As for Putnam, he plays Cassirer to Rorty’s Heidegger – assuming the ‘Geist der Weltgeschichte’ has shifted from Germany to America…."

Maeve Cooke on Law and Violence

2008-02-23T13:19:00.001+11:00

LSE Law Department and Forum for European Philosophy

Lecture Series
Law, Reason, Violence

Monday 25 February, 6.00-7.30pm
Room D702, Clement House, LSE

Law and Violence

Maeve Cooke, Professor at University College Dublin, School of Philosophy

Richard Rorty's Philosophical Legacy

2008-02-20T12:11:00.000+11:00

by Steve Fuller

Abstract:
Richard Rorty's recent death has unleashed a strikingly mixed judgment of his philosophical legacy, ranging from claims to originality to charges of charlatanry. What is clear, however, is Rorty's role in articulating a distinctive American voice in the history of philosophy. He achieved this not only through his own wide-ranging contributions but also by repositioning the pragmatists, especially William James and John Dewey, in the philosophical mainstream. Rorty did for the United States what Hegel and Heidegger had done for Germany—to portray his nation as philosophy's final resting place. He was helped by postwar German philosophers like Jürgen Habermas who were happy to defer to their American conquerors. Rorty's philosophical method can be understood as a sublimation of America's world-historic self-understanding: a place suspicious of foreigners unless they are willing to blend into the "melting pot." In retrospect, the breadth and confidence of Rorty's writing will come to symbolize the moment when the United States, for better or worse, came to be the world's dominant philosophical power.

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 38, No. 1, 121-132 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0048393107311457
© 2008 SAGE Publications

CFP: SEP/FEP Conference

2008-02-12T15:37:00.000+11:00

Call for Papers for the 4th Annual Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland, 29-31 August, 2008.

The SEP-FEP Joint Conference offers faculty and graduate students the opportunity to present papers in any area of European Philosophy. Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted by 30th May 2008 to Juliana Cardinale, either in electronic form to J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk or by mail to:

Forum for European Philosophy
Room J5, European Institute
Cowdray House, Portugal Street
London School of Economics, London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

In addition to proposals for individual papers (as above) proposals for themed panels of (up to) four speakers on any area of European Philosophy are also invited. If you would like to organise a themed panel please contact Brian O’Connor before 18th April, 2008 at brian.oconnor@ucd.ie.
The conference keynote speakers are:

Françoise Dastur (Nice)
Alessandro Ferrara (Rome)
Jean Luc Marion (Paris IV/Chicago)
Michael Rosen (Harvard).

There are also two open plenary sessions: The Possibilities of Critical Theory, Maeve Cooke (UCD) and The Future of Phenomenology, Dermot Moran (UCD).

from here

Pragmatic vs Semantic universalism

2008-02-12T15:13:00.000+11:00

Laws satisfy the conditions of pragmatic, and not merely semantic, universality when they are the results of an inclusive procedure of will-formation marked by discussion and publicity.

TDW: 122.

The End of Immanent Critique?

2008-02-01T03:48:00.000+11:00

By Craig Browne

Abstract:

Immanent critique has been a defining feature of the programme of critical social theory. It is a methodology that underpins theoretical diagnoses of contemporary society, based on its linking normative and empirical modes of analysis. Immanent critique distinctively seeks to discern emancipatory or democratizing tendencies. However, the viability of immanent critique is currently in question. Habermas argued that it was necessary to revise the normative foundations of critical social theory, late-capitalist developments tended to undermine immanent critique. Although there is a need for critical social theory to incorporate aspects of alternative interpretations of the contemporary period, the logics of influential theoretical perspectives on the present, especially postmodernism, the risk society and globalization, will be shown to be inconsistent with some of immanent critique's presuppositions. The synthetic aspirations of critical social theory nevertheless persist in recent attempts to reconcile positive liberty and social justice.

full here

Globalizing Democracy: Reflections on Habermas's Radicalism

2008-02-01T03:43:00.000+11:00

By Pauline Johnson

Abstract:

According to many of his critics, Habermas is so preoccupied with `old normative maps' that he cannot really help us chart our options in a fast globalizing world. The following article contests aspects of this familiar critique. The argument is developed in three stages. First, some misapprehensions are targeted. No unreconstructed liberal, Habermas is shown to offer a discriminating interpretation of learning processes that need to guide political democracy in a global context. The far-reaching agenda of Habermas's programme for a globalized and democratized welfare project is underlined. Next, Habermas's attempt to bring forward the normative resources of liberal democratic histories is contrasted with Ulrich Beck's normative avant-gardism. This latter is shown to be a mere semblance of radicalism that serves to legitimate the triumph of one particular axis within modernization processes. Finally, the article explores a dilemma that faces Habermas's attempt to use the potentials of a particular cultural tradition as the normative grounds for a globally extended democracy. Habermas wants to avoid reducing critical theory to the mere affirmation of certain parochial cultural choices and so tries to find grounds for establishing the universal resonance of these normative contents. The last section looks into the ideological character of this attempt and considers an alternative way in which the inter-cultural significance of democratic Enlightenment commitments might be tested.

from here

The Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking

2008-02-01T00:53:00.000+11:00

here

Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

2008-01-31T20:52:00.000+11:00

available for pre order from here

Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral Theory and Habermas’ Discourse Ethics.

2008-01-30T02:33:00.000+11:00

Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral Theory and Habermas’ Discourse Ethics,
by James Gordon Finlayson (available for download from here)

On "Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion"

2008-01-18T11:45:00.000+11:00

"In these writings, Habermas presents himself as a new Kant (however much he might keep his distance from him in relation to specific issues) – a Kant of communicative reason and of the post-Darwin era. It is no coincidence that the study of Kant’s philosophy of religion is the most brilliant in the volume. Habermas also adopts the stance towards religion characteristic of the moralist Kant in its multiple manifestations. The more technical sections of the volume – examinations of thinkers associated with Habermas in various ways such as Adorno, Apel, McCarthy and Menke – demonstrate the enormous aspirations of this philosophy. And the closing chapter, in which Habermas joins in the debates on reform of the UN, is consciously reminiscent of Kant’s reflections on perpetual peace, presented as a draft agreement. Habermas no longer expounds his erstwhile faith in the motivating force of morality as such; and he has also overcome his exclusive concentration on the law, which was an attempt to make up for this lack. But as with Kant, the fascination exerted by religion remains tightly fenced in by morality. The call for a productive dialogue between believers and non-believers has, however, rarely been made with such eloquence and concision."

full here

What happened to Rick Roderick?

2008-01-18T11:19:00.000+11:00

Some tragic facts about the author of one of the best books on Habermas with some online resources (here).

Courtesy of Struggles with Philosophy

Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology

2008-01-16T01:45:00.000+11:00

Abstract

The debate between Marcuse and Habermas over technology marked a significant turning point in the history of the Frankfurt School. After the 1960s Habermas's influence grew as Marcuse's declined and Critical Theory adopted a far less utopian stance. Recently there has been a revival of quite radical technology criticism in the environmental movement and under the influence of Foucault and constructivism. This article takes a new look at the earlier debate from the standpoint of these recent developments. While much of Habermas's argument remains persuasive, his defense of modernity now seems to concede far too much to the claims of autonomous technology. His essentialist picture of technology as an application of a purely instrumental form of nonsocial rationality is less plausible after a decade of historicizing research in technology studies. The article argues that Marcuse was right after all to claim that technology is socially determined even if he was unable to develop his insight fruitfully. The article derives a new approach to technology criticism from both constructivism and Habermas's communication theory. The essence of technology is shown to be historical and reflexive, like the essence of other social institutions. As such an institution, its rationality is always implemented in value-biased forms subject to political critique.

full here

Habermas and Foucault

2008-01-11T18:17:00.000+11:00

Habermas' and Foucault's approaches have many similarities and they share basic commitment to the project of freedom. Where they disagree is how to justify this project. For Habermas this requires proving non contingency of the project of freedom because he thinks that without this one cannot claim universal validity for such a project. For Foucault however the project is essentially contingent. However, this doesn't make the project less important or less dignified. Within this broader context, Habermas' and Foucault's respective projects take different shapes. True to his intent Habermas' whole project can be seen as trying to develop a theory of rationality (broadly construed in both theoretical and practical senses) from philosophical as well as sociological angles, from synchronic as well as diachronic viewpoints. Foucault on the other hand is more "practical." He takes our essential task to be not so much "seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science" but rather "to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom." The task is to make possible the real exercise of freedom. This is a practical task and a difficult task. Archeology and genealogy are tools for making this difficult and precarious work of freedom possible. The project of freedom cannot rely on metaphysical or scientific certainties, nor on the promise of utopias. The only guarantee of freedom is freedom itself.

related posts

cross posted at Foucauldian Reflections

national consciousness is a construct

2008-01-07T18:46:00.000+11:00

. . . national consciousness is a thoroughly modern form of consciousness, though it assumes a pseudo-natural appearance. The idea of national history was an academic construct made possible by historians, folklorists, and literary critics. It was introduced into the educational process via the school and family, disseminated through mass communication, and anchored in the outlook of generations primed for war through the mobilization of conscripts.

Habermas, DW: 76-77.

Habermas sounds like Foucault here, doesn’t he?

Why is a world state implausible?

2008-01-05T02:04:00.000+11:00

A world state is implausible because states need something to contrast themselves with. As Habermas says, in a line of thought borrowed directly from Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist whose exasperation with the constitutional arrangements of Weimar Germany led him eventually into the hands of the Nazis, ‘any political community that wants to understand itself as a democracy must at least distinguish between members and non-members.’ A world community of citizens, even if generating what Habermas calls ‘a form of democratically elected political representation’, would lack anything convincing to represent. It would have instead to fall back on ‘a legal-moral form of self-understanding’, which is another way of saying that it would depend almost entirely on the language of human rights. These rights can generate plausible legal procedures, they can generate widespread feelings of sympathy, they can even produce a general sense of indignation when they are violated. What they can’t provide is a sense of identity, of the kind that political parties think that it is worth fighting over.

from here

Going beyond universalism and particularism

2007-12-19T18:29:00.001+11:00

Kant does not sufficiently differentiate the conception of cosmopolitan conditions from the concretistic notion of world republic. Kant ignores the fact that a world republic would require a concrete lifeworld in order to function properly. Such a lifeworld does not exist. Moreover, it seems to be a conceptual ‘impossibility’. Lifeworlds, no matter how much decentration they might have gone through, are inherently particularistic. A global lifeworld would never be thick enough to support and sustain the working of a universal state. Such a state would require the use of coercive force which is nevertheless deemed legitimate by the actors themselves. The production and reproduction of legitimacy requires a very thin conception of lifeworld which is based on shared values, shared history, shared memories, and shared language etc.

Habermas’ critique of the Kantian notion of world republic shows his appreciation of the role of particularities in sustaining human life and its organization. Although true to his universalism he claims that all human beings are brothers and sisters, nevertheless, he also knows that there can not be a universal lifeworld shared by everyone, a lifeworld thick enough to sustain a world republic.

Habermas considers a middle way between ethnocentric universalism of the current American administration and the concretistic universalism of Kant. Habermas instead proposes a post nationalistic constellation whereby the nation state does not lose its relevance but is nonetheless opens towards the other. The whole notion of the withering away of the nation state does not appeal to Habermas because he recognizes the supreme significance of particularities in organizing and sustaining human life and its organization.

As mentioned above, Habermas is also against closed particularities. The notions of closedness and openness are relative and are to be understood historically. With this proviso, openness is important for two reasons: First, it is the basis of autonomy, a key notion which underpins Modernity. Second, it is important because with the evolution of capitalism and advent of globalization, the state risks irrelevance if it does not open up to the other. However, this opening up or generalization must be based on respect for particularities, i.e. it should emerge from within.

=
Related posts:

Does Habermas break his own rule?

Particularity, generality and Rationality

Transforming Communication: Habermas and Brandom in Dialogue

2007-12-19T11:28:00.000+11:00

"What we discovered as we worked through the material, however, was that certain key issues at stake in the debate refused to come more clearly into focus as we tried to work them out. On the one hand, we came to feel that there were some key miscommunications at play – places where Habermas in particular seemed to find claims in Brandom’s work that we ourselves couldn’t find. On the other hand, we also came increasingly to feel that Habermas comes by at least some of these miscommunications honestly: that certain elements in Brandom’s project refused to come into focus for us, even after a careful attempt to get to the bottom of his system. We came to understand a bit better why such an argument might break out, and to feel that the presence of the argument does point to key issues that we, along with Habermas, have not quite been able to resolve in Brandom’s project. We therefore present this piece still in a moment of intense uncertainty, with a great deal of work still to be done to achieve our own goal of understanding the implications and potentials for critical social theory of Brandom’s philosophical work."

full here