The Philosophy of Jurgen Habermas: A Critical Introduction

✍ Scribed by Uwe Steinhoff

• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 299
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

J?rgen 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.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 12
Introduction......Page 14
1. “Communicative” versus Purposive Rationality......Page 17
1.1. The Unrivalled Status of Purposive Rationality......Page 18
1.2.1. Habermas’s Explication(s) of the Concept of Rationality......Page 22
1.2.2. The Failure of All Arguments against the Reducibility of Understanding-oriented Action to Success-oriented Action......Page 33
1.3. From Action Oriented towards Reaching Understanding to a Discourse Theory of Rationality......Page 59
1.3.1. On the Alleged Link with the Practice of Argumentation......Page 62
1.3.2. The Claims of a Discourse Theory of Rationality......Page 64
1.3.3. Integration or Confusion?......Page 85
2. The Justification of Discourse Ethics......Page 91
2.1. Habermas’s Preliminary Considerations......Page 92
2.2.1. Methods of Identifying Norms of Discourse......Page 107
2.2.2. Transcendental Pragmatics......Page 109
2.3. The Untenability of the Principle U and the Failure of its Alleged Derivation......Page 156
2.4. The Failure of Habermas’s Justification of Consensus Theory......Page 166
2.5. The Unsolved Problem of the Application of Norms Justified by U or D to Real Situations......Page 180
3.1.1. The Development of the Self......Page 194
3.1.2. Moral Development......Page 196
3.1.3. Communicative Pathologies......Page 197
3.2.1. Hominization......Page 206
3.2.2. Socio-cultural Evolution......Page 207
3.3.1. Habermas’s Theory of Order......Page 213
3.3.2. The Colonization Thesis......Page 223
3.3.3. The “Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy”......Page 232
3.3.4. Habermas’s Theory of Modernity......Page 249
Conclusion......Page 254
Appendix......Page 256
Notes......Page 262
Bibliography......Page 285
C......Page 294
G......Page 295
M......Page 296
P......Page 297
S......Page 298
Y......Page 299