“Nostalgia for a redeemed future: Critical Theory”

John Cabot University is hosting an international conference on Critical Theory, which will be held at its campus in Rome, Italy – Via della
Lungara 233.

The conference will examine the importance and the actuality of the Frankfurt School by addressing both the philosophical tradition of the early stages of Critical theory – and in particular the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse – as well as the application of their theories to our contemporary society. In order to reflect the wide range of topics addressed by Critical Theory, the conference will cover different aspects of philosophical reflection on politics, aesthetics, sociology, technology, literature and any other
relevant field of study.

The conference will be held at John Cabot University on the weekend of April 27-29, 2007. It will begin on Friday morning and end by early afternoon on Sunday. During the sessions, each speaker will have one hour, with about 40 minutes for presentation, followed by 20-30 minutes of discussion. All presentations will be made in English.

Keynote speakers:

Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University Chicago
Andrew Feenberg, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver
David Ingram, Loyola University Chicago (to be confirmed)
Douglas Kellner, University of California Los Angeles (to be confirmed)
Max Pensky, SUNY Binghamton
Stefano Petrucciani, University of Rome, La Sapienza
Francesco Saverio Trincia, University of Rome, La Sapienza

If you are interested in presenting a paper, please submit a 1-2 page abstract by December 15, 2006 (including name, eventual institutional affiliation and mailing address). Abstracts should be submitted by email. Decisions regarding the program will be made by January 15, 2007. The presented papers will be published in a book dedicated to the conference.

To submit an abstract, or for more information, contact:
Stefano Giacchetti – sgiacchetti(at)johncabot(dot)edu

Please feel free to forward this announcement to others whom you think
might be interested.

Habermas' theory of communicative action and the theory of social capital

I am bringing together two clusters of ideas I think are important. One is the thought of the German writer Jürgen Habermas, a prominent philosopher whose ideas are meaningful to many of our colleagues who are what I’ll call “planning academics,” that is scholars who teach planning in universities. The other is a cluster of ideas on social capital and social networks.

Habermas is a contemporary philosopher with a worldwide reputation. One of his best-known ideas is communicative action, in which actors in society seek to reach common understanding and to coordinate actions by reasoned argument, consensus, and cooperation rather than strategic action strictly in pursuit of their own goals (Habermas, 1984, p. 86). However, it’s not only his general fame that makes him relevant to social capital and networks. There are other reasons more specific to geography and regional science. One is that many geographers, sociologists, and
planning theorists appeal to his ideas in their work (though not many economists do). Prominent examples are scholars who apply Habermas’s ideas to a general (but not Marxist) critique of late capitalist societies, to analysis of mass movements, and to normative assessments of planning practice . . . ."

download full paper from here

Related post

Habermas' theory of communicative action

Abstract. The paper discusses the contribution of J. Habermas to the foundation of anew social paradigm in the form of the communicative action theory. The author firstgives a global survey of Habermas's intellectual development, starting from Marxthrough the critical theory to post-Marxism that Habermas finally left behind sinceoriented towards convergence and integration of the social action theory, the systemtheory and the symbolic interactionism theory.Unlike Marx's paradigm of production and social labor as the basic category Marxisttheory is built upon, Habermas has built a new paradigm of the communicative actionfocused upon the communicative mind, communication and rationality as well as thecommunicative community. The author critically points to the values as well as innerlimits of Habermas's theory that reduced a complex and controversial class nature ofthe society to the "communicative community" thus promoting idealistic worship of therole of the rational discourse.

download the paper for free from here

via here

spontaneity as our innermost 'nature'

"The prospect of biogenetic intervention opened up by increasing access to the human genome effectively emancipates humankind from the constraints of a finite species, from enslavement to the 'selfish gene'. Emancipation comes at a price, however. In a talk he gave in Marburg in 2001, Habermas repeated his warning against biogenetic manipulation. There are, as he sees it, two main threats. First, that such interventions will blur the borderline between the made and the spontaneous and thus affect the way we understand ourselves. For an adolescent to learn that his 'spontaneous' (say, aggressive or peaceful) disposition is the result of a deliberate external intervention into his genetic code will undermine the heart of his identity, putting paid to the notion that we develop our moral being through Bildung, the painful struggle to educate our natural dispositions. Ultimately, biogenetic intervention could render the idea of education meaningless. Second, such interventions will give rise to asymmetrical relations between those who are 'spontaneously' human and those whose characters have been manipulated: some individuals will be the privileged 'creators' of others.

At the most elementary level, this will affect our sexual identity. The ability of parents to choose the sex of their offspring is one issue. Another is the status of sex-change operations. Up until now, it has been possible to justify these by evoking a gap between biological and psychic identity: when a biological man experiences himself as a woman trapped in a man's body, it is reasonable that (s)he be allowed to change her biological sex in order to introduce a balance between her sexual and her emotional life. Biogenetic manipulation opens up much more radical perspectives. It may retroactively change our understanding of ourselves as 'natural' beings, in the sense that we will experience our 'natural' dispositions as mediated, not as given - as things which can in principle be manipulated and therefore as merely contingent. There can be no return to a naive immediacy once we know that our natural dispositions depend on genetic contingency; to stick to them through thick and thin will be as false as sticking to the old 'organic' mores. According to Habermas, however, we should act as if this were not the case, and thus maintain our sense of dignity and autonomy. The paradox is that this autonomy can be preserved only by prohibiting access to the contingency which determines us - that is, by limiting the possibilities of scientific intervention. This is a new version of the old argument that, if we are to retain our moral dignity, it's better not to know certain things. Curtailing science, as Habermas seems to be suggesting, would come at the price of widening the split between science and ethics: a split which already prevents us from seeing the way these new conditions compel us to transform and reinvent the notions of freedom, autonomy and ethical responsibility."

Full here

Habermas: An enemy of German nationalism

"Last month, the intellectual historian Alan Ryan, writing in the New York Review of Books, described Jürgen Habermas, Germany's leading political philosopher and a public intellectual of unrivaled influence, as the "philosophical conscience" of Gerhard Schroeder's Red-Green government. Judging from the intellectual trajectory of both Habermas, who has moved (roughly) from a radical critique of market society to a humanistic liberalism not unlike that of the late John Rawls, and Schroeder, the student agitator turned Third Way poster-boy, the characterization makes a good deal of sense. Yet if Habermas is indeed the Red-Green government's philosophical conscience, Schroeder and Joschka Fischer, the Green foreign minister who has overshadowed his Social Democratic counterpart from the start, have a lot to answer for.

Since the late 1950s, Habermas has been best known not for his dense theoretical works but rather for his forceful public interventions, the most memorable of which have focused on questions of German national identity. Despite having spent most of his adult life criticizing German evasions and hypocrisies, Habermas has been the country's most vocal and passionate defender of the values embodied in its post-war constitutional settlement.

;;;;

Habermas, Schroeder's "philosophical conscience," has articulated a very different vision for Germany. He has long been an enemy of German nationalism, choosing instead to endorse a universalistic constitutional patriotism grounded in the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Basic Law. In this sense, he is, ironically for a man of the left, the last partisan of Adenauer's Bonn Republic. His is a better, more humane vision, one compatible with a diverse European federation that lives up to its humanitarian obligations, an imaginable utopia (if only just) that may or may not emerge in the years to come."

full here

Remembering Adorno

Remembering Adorno
John Abromeit

here

Philosophy in Germany

Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth

SC: Simply as a way of initially organizing our discussion, we both agreed to read a short article by Dieter Henrich that appeared in Merkur in his philosophy column, 'Eine Generation im Abgang' ('A Passing Generation').1 Henrich rightly claims that a change of generations is coming to an end in German philosophy, which is most clearly marked by the retirement of Jürgen Habermas in 1994 and the death of Hans Blumenberg in 1996. But we might also speak of a wider generational change that would include Karl- Otto Apel, Ernst Tugendhat, Michael Theunissen and Niklas Luhmann, as well as figures like Otto Poeggeler and Robert Spaemann. Almost all of this generation are now retired, and it is at the moment unclear who and what will take their place.

As Henrich explains, the oldest and the youngest of this generation are only separated by about fifteen years, and most of then came out of three philosophical schools - Bonn, Münster and Heidelberg. Gadamer's name, and his brand of urbane Heideggerianism, should also be mentioned in this postwar conjuncture, although he precedes the generation we are talking about. Before moving on to the question of how the contemporary philosophical scene looks in Germany, we might perhaps begin with Henrich's description of what the 'passing generation' had in common. First and foremost, despite their obvious philosophical and ideological differences, what they shared was a common context: the overwhelming presence of the trauma and catastrophe of National Socialism. Thinking of Habermas, if one reads a fascinating early piece from 1961 on 'Der deutsche Idealismus der jüdischen Philosophen' ('The German Idealism of Jewish Philosophers'), it reveals the postwar philosophical ambition to reconcile Jews and Germans.2 But Henrich puts the issue in the following terms:

With these considerations in mind one has really understood what the first task of young philosophers in postwar Germany had to be: essentially they worked in order to maintain or restore the worldwide credibility of thinking in the German language. Alongside music, philosophy was for a long time the most significant cultural export good of Germany. Since Kant, German philosophy has distinguished itself through a basic style of investigation that always ended in a synthesis in answer to questions of principle, limit and life.3
To this demand for synthesis, we might also add the requirement of universalism and the method of rational argumentation. So it would seem that it is through a rationally achieved synthesis with a universalist scope that German philosophy responds to the catastrophe of National Socialism; and this is combined with an overwhelming fear of relativism and irrationalism, which always seems to go together with the fear of reducing the wissenschaftlich ('scientific') character of philosophy, or the reduction of philosophy to what Henrich calls 'Literarisierung' ('making literary'). In your view, is this a fair characterization of German philosophy in the postwar period?

AH: Yes, I think it is to a certain degree, but maybe it is not broad or differentiated enough. As is indicated by the Habermas article you mentioned, there was not only the search for the restoration of a certain kind of credibility; there was also from the beginning among some of that postwar generation the ambition to address and clarify the moral disaster of National Socialism. There was therefore not only the attempt to regain the great German tradition in the sense of the Kantian heritage but also to regain or overcome the separation from the Jewish tradition, which was highly specific and extremely important for the whole of German philosophy at the beginning of the century. This was not only an enterprise of Habermas, but others too, who attempted to reconstruct the specifically Jewish element in German philosophy. If you take the example of someone like Michael Theunissen, he spent a lot of energy in his first major work - the book on the Other - reconstructing the work of Martin Buber, and that was intentional.4 It was meant to overcome the separation between the Jewish tradition and the German situation after the Second World War. This is something totally excluded from the picture given by Henrich.

The other thing that he underestimates is, let us say, the moral dimension of the early period of German philosophy after the Second World War, after the disaster or catastrophe. This is something best described by Karl-Otto Apel in a famous article which I strongly recommend.5 There Apel describes his own enterprise - namely, the search for a universal ground for moral principles of respect and autonomy - as a response to, and a clarification of, the moral dimension of the disaster. So there was also the moral dimension in that whole postwar period, and this is also not clearly enough indicated by Henrich. That is very closely connected with people in Bonn. I mean, if you take the three universities mentioned by Henrich, then one should be careful to differentiate between these places. For example, it is interesting that in Münster from very early on - the middle of the 1950s I think - there were several people trying to come into contact with Carl Schmitt. It is hard to explain why suddenly, in a group of younger people, there was this interest in the work of Schmitt when they were all aware that he had been deeply involved in the fascist juridical administration. These people were no longer connected to the fascist world; they were trying to be liberals, democratic liberals. I think one can explain this interest in Schmitt because he was the only one who participated in fascism who never publicly regretted having done so. This made Schmitt quite singular because all the others - Gehlen and even Heidegger - were either silenced by their involvement, or very quickly became converts to the new regime. So, to complicate Henrich's picture, this interest in Schmitt at Münster, which came out of the circle of Joachim Ritter, led to a very fruitful, although not unproblematic, relation to the prewar past. All I want to say is that Henrich's picture is not differentiated enough. I think it is rather simplistic to say that the main ambition of postwar German philosophy was to regain credibility; there were so many other motives, moral motives. There was also the motive of finding one's place in a culture increasingly influenced by the United States. One should not forget the continuation of the Heideggerian tradition to an incredible degree in the postwar period. In Bonn, where Habermas and Apel were students, the influence of Heidegger was striking. Habermas and Apel started as what we might call left Heideggerians. If one adds these additional elements to Henrich's picture, then I think it is basically correct.

SC: OK. But what about the desire for synthesis that Henrich talks about. Does this define the postwar period of German philosophy?

AH: Yes. I think what was still very important, and almost seen as self-evident in that period, is that any philosophical enterprise requires synthetic power. I wouldn't reduce that requirement uniquely to Kant's philosophy, as it is a very traditional idea of German philosophy that you have to construct your own system. You have to find your own theory, your own philosophical position. This was a requirement not explicitly formulated but deeply internalized. So it was true that almost all the main figures in the generation we are speaking of had the strong belief that they had to formulate their own systematic philosophical position during the next ten or twenty years. This was indeed as it has been in the prewar period, where you had Husserl or Nikolai Hartmann or Heidegger; where you not only had philosophical teachers and professional philosophers, but strong philosophical positions connected to specific persons. Each one stood for a whole programme, and you could describe the philosophical landscape with reference to persons who represented clearly demarcated positions, discrete forms of synthesis. It was clearly understood that in order to find your own synthetic position, your own new and original position, you had to rework the philosophical tradition. Originality was the requirement both before and after the war.

Published in Radical Philosophy

Habermas and insistence on the ultimacy of internal critique

“[The] call for self criticism, let us say, a self critical defense of the, achievements of Western modernity that signals both openness and a willingness to learn and above all overcomes the idiotic equation of democratic order and liberal society with unbridled capitalism. One the one hand, we must make it clear stand against fundamentalism, including Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, and, on the other, we must acknowledge that fundamentalism is the child of disruptive process of modernization in which the aberrations of our colonial history and failures of decolonization played a decisive role. We can at any rate make clear against such fundamentalist fixations that justified criticism of the West derives its standards from the West’s own 200 year old discourse of self criticism.”

full here

I wonder why Habermas insists that the West be judged according to its own standards only?? Why can't we have an external critique of the West?

Does weblogs and podcasting meet Habermas's ideal of the public sphere

The conclusion is:

Blogs do not meet Habermas' ideals but they are probably the closest thing to it. The barriers of use make the internet and blogging an activity that only a small number of socity can do. Within this small community there is a hierarchy and just because you can publish it doesn't mean it will be viewed. THe internet can encourage rational debate. However Habermas' ideals are fairly dated now, people would much rather see a picture of other peoples cats on MySpace or pictures of their last trip to europe on photobucket then discuss politics/news arts/culture and science technology.

full here

Habermas on feelings and desires

We should not understand subjective experiences as mental states or inner episodes, for we would thereby assimilate them to entities, to elements fot the objective world. We can comprehend having subjective experiences as something analogous to the existence of states of affairs without assimilating one to the other. A subject capable of expression does not “have” or “possess” desires and feelings in the same sense as an observable object has extension, weight, color, and similar properties. An actor has desires and feelings in teh sense that he can at will express these experiences before a public, and indeed in such a way that this public, if it trusts the actor’s expressive utterances, attributes to him, as something subjective, the desires and feelings expressed. (Reconstructing Historical Materialism, 147)

full here

Jürgen Habermas on the lagging process of European integration

"Jürgen Habermas has given a fiery speech in the town of Petersberg near Bonn on the lagging process of European integration, printed by the Kölner Stadtanzeiger. "The topic of Europe has been devalued, people would rather deal with their own national agenda. Here in Germany, grandfathers hug grandchildren, overwhelmed by the new feel-good patriotism. The assurance given by our salutary national roots is supposed to make our effete welfare-state population 'fit' for global competition. This rhetoric suits the current state of social-Darwinist world politics.""

from here

see Die Erweiterung des Horizonts

Haberams Foucault debate: A note on resources

For Habermas’ intervention in the debate see PDoM. For Foucault's brief and indirect response see his Waht is Enlightenment in Foucualt Reader.For For an overview of the debate see Thomas McCarthy and David Hoy eds. Critical theory (Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA : B. Blackwell, 1994), Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and illusions : on reconstruction and deconstruction in contemporary critical theory (Cambridge, Mass., : M.I.T. Press, c1991), / Michael Kelly ed. Critique and power : recasting the Foucault/Habermas debate (Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, c1994), Samantha Ashenden and David Owen eds. Foucault contra Habermas : recasting the dialogue between genealogy and critical theory / edited by (London : SAGE, 1999), Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib eds; Habermas and the unfinished project of modernity : critical essays on The philosophical discourse of modernity. (Cambridge : Polity Press, 1996), Axel Honneth, The critique of power : reflective stages in a critical social theory ; trans. Kenneth Baynes, (Cambridge, Mass., : M.I.T. Press, 1991).

A reveiw of Habermas' "The future of Human Nature"

By Joel Anderson for free download here

Many other relevant papers by Joel Anderson related to Habermas can be downloaded from here

Whose Discourse? A Comparison of the Foucauldian and Habermasian concepts of discourse ...

ABSTRACT

The concept of discourse is of high importance for non-positivist research in information systems. At the same time there are different concepts of discourse that are used simultaneously and often without clear recognition what their choice entails.This paper therefore aims to clarify the conceptual basis of working with discourses in IS research. In order to do this it describes and compares the notions of discourse as we find them in two of the most influential discourse theories, namely those by Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. A comparison of the two from the point of the IS researcher argues that the most important feature that Foucault's and Habermas's discourse theories have in common is their critical intention. From this point of view, both concepts have strengths and can be used to complement each other despite their fundamental differences.

download for free

Intersubjectivity – interactionist or discursive? Reflections on Habermas’ critique of Brandom

Piet Strydom
Department of Sociology, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

This article argues that there is a marked ambivalence in Habermas’ concept of intersubjectivity in that he wavers between an interactionist and a discursive understanding. This ambivalence is demonstrated with reference to his recent critique of Robert Brandom's normative pragmatic theory of discursive practice. Although Habermas is a leading theorist of discourse as an epistemically steered process, he allows his interpretation of Brandom's theory as suffering from objective idealism to compel him to recoil from discourse and to defend a purely interactionist or dialogical position. It is argued that the ambivalence in question is related to Habermas’ incomplete theorization of communication as a process of structure formation that unfolds sequentially through time on different levels. His architectonic of communicative intersubjectivity is marred by a missing concept. His characteristic concept of coordination is insufficient and must be complemented by a concept of synthesis at the discursive level.


Key Words: Brandom • communication • coordination • discursive • synthesis • Habermas • Luhmann • objectivism • process • sequentiality • structure formation • time

from here

The Habermasian Moment

AMONG SPOKESMEN FOR THE Post-Marxist Left, Jürgen Habermas
(1923–) may be the most prominent and, in his own country, the most
honored. An advocate of “militant” democracy since the 1950s, he
has defended his persuasion in the international press, in multiple
books and articles, and as an academic lecturer.
Habermas proclaims himself the proud heir of the American
reeducation of the Germans that took place after World War I.
Despite his rise in the Hitlerjugend, a distinction shared with other
scholars who have been equally intent on breaking with the German
past, Habermas had moved into the anti-German Left by the early
1950s. He regarded what the Germans had suffered during and after
the War as fully deserved, and spoke of his country’s unconditional
surrender as a “liberating experience.

for full go here

Between Hope and Terror: Derrida and Habermas Plead for the Im/Possible

”Between Hope and Terror: Derrida and Habermas Plead for the Im/Possible,” Epoche 9:1 (2004) 1-18. In Lasse A. Thomassen, ed. The Derrida-Habermas Reader. Edinburgh UP, 2006, 278-296.

free download from here

Singular Existence and Critical Theory

Radical Philosophy Review 8/2 (2005) 211-223.

"Major statement on Habermas’s Kyoto Award speech in November 2004. This paper is part of the Review Forum on my Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile , with two preceding papers by David S. Owen, Critical Theory and Learning from History (187-195) and Max Pensky, Jürgen Habermas: Existential Hero? (192-209)"

download for free here

Habermas’ turn?

Martin Beck Matutík
Philosophy Department, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

How a thinker comes to adopt or change a view may be regarded as either a strictly theoretical or biographical issue. First, looking backward at my completed philosophical-political profile of Habermas, I elucidate how biographical methodology can yield a coherent yet dynamically evolving profile rather than a static portrait. Second, examining Habermas’ thinking after 2000, the year my published biography of him ends, I venture a biographical-philosophical hypothesis that in what appears to be Habermas’ turn after 11 September 2001, or in his decisive self-choice, he is faithful to the basic motives and core intuitions that brought him to critical theory.


Key Words: biography • cosmopolitanism • critical theory • existentialism • Jürgen Habermas • Søren Kierkegaard • 9/11 • religion • terror • UN

full here

Martin Beck Matustik, Jurgen Habermas – A Philosophical-Political ...

A review here

Lecture archive

here

Habermas' speeches/lectures online!

Radiobremen archive with transcripts, here

Habermas, Zizek and Language.

"Firstly, he [Zizek] opposes Levinas' theorization of the other for being one sided and thus on its own terms the most grotesque violence against the other. He argued that the politicization of our society is as "the fear of the neighbour" - the neighbor is the homely face under which lurks an evil, (uncanny) spectre. Fear of the neighbor is related to proximity - the global village, and communication. More communication, more epistemic proximity between societies which are traditionally seperated by a gulf of a thousand miles, means more conflict between them (....). Alianation is sometimes useful - alianation maintains the abyssmal gulf between the self and the other. Habermas, others, argue language is the essential structural tool of unity - it is through language that we can understand each other, and even in conflict, conflict through language presupposes that we comprehend each other to some extent. Zizek flips this: Language is perhaps not the greatest tool of unity, but the greatest divider. It's because of language that it is easier to communicate with a Mongolian's dog than with the Mongolian person. Language makes it possible for us to be much more divided and in conflict than animals."

from here

A new philosophy blog

in German, here.

Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention

"Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is an immensely rich and influential book that has had major impact in a variety of disciplines. It has also received detailed critique and promoted extremely productive discussions of liberal democracy, civil society, public life, and social changes in the twentieth century, among other issues. Few books of the second half of the twentieth century have been so seriously discussed in so many different fields and continue, almost forty years after its initial publication in 1962, to generate such productive controversy and insight. While Habermas's thought took several crucial philosophical twists and turns after the publication of his first major book, he has himself provided detailed commentary on Structural Transformation in the 1990s and returned to issues of the public sphere and democratic theory in his monumental work Between Facts and Norms. Hence, concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Habermas's work that deserves respect and critical scrutiny.



In this paper, I will first explicate Habermas's concept of the public sphere and its structural transformation in his early writings and then will note how he takes up similar themes in his recent 1990s work within the context of a structural transformation of his own work in his linguistic turn. After setting out a variety of critiques which his analysis has elicited, including some of my own, I attempt to develop the notion of the public sphere in the contemporary era. Hence, my study intends to point to the continuing importance of Habermas's problematic and its relevance for debates over democratic politics and social and cultural life in the present age. At stake is delineating a concept of the public sphere which facilitates maximum public participation and debate over the key issues of the current conjuncture and which consequently promotes the cause of participatory democracy."

full here