Online research in philosophy

This is the first systematic assessment of the work of Jürgen Habermas - the key theorist of the later Frankfurt School, whose writing has had a major impact on social theory and sociology. These four volumes comprise the key secondary literature on Habermas. Edited by David Rasmussen and James Swindal, leading commentators on Habermas's work, this will be the standard reference work on one of the canonical theorists of the 20th century. VOLUME ONE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF HABERMAS'S PROJECT Habermas as a Critical Theorist \ Habermas, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory \ The Modernity/Postmodernity Debate VOLUME TWO:LAW AND POLITICS Law and Democratic Theory \ The Public Sphere \ Culture and Society VOLUME THREE: ETHICS Discourse Ethics \ Rethinking Discourse Ethics \ Autonomy and Authenticity VOLUME FOUR: COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY, FORMAL PRAGMATICS, SPEECH ACT THEORY AND TRUTH Communicative Rationality \ Formal Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory \ Nature, History and the Logic of Development \ Truth.

The out?dated intentionalistic assumptions manifest in Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action undermine a solution to the problem of order in action theory beyond utilitarianism. An analysis of his intersubjectivistic conception, which is based on the theory of the speech?act, shows that the incompleteness of Habermas's linguistic turn is due to his attempt to revive the older Critical Theory's concept of critique. The claims for a scientifically well?founded revival of a universal concept of reason ? which are asserted in this concept ? invalidate the intersubjectivistic paradigm in action theory and therefore obstruct the way to a de?individualized formulation of the theory of social contract that avoids the paradox of utilitarian models.

The theory of communicative action : a synopsis -- Literary rationality and communicative reason -- The claim of authenticity : Wolfgang Hilbig and the novel "Ich" -- Concluding remark.

There is an underlying idea of symmetry involved in most notions of rationality. From a dialogical philosophical standpoint, however, the symmetry implied by social contract theories and so-called Golden Rule thinking is anchored to a Cartesian subject–object world and is therefore not equipped to address recognition – at least not if recognition is to be understood as something happening between subjects. For this purpose, the dialogical symmetry implied by Habermas' communicative action does a much better job. Still, it is insufficient to embrace those kinds of recognition that are dependent on asymmetry and concrete difference. This article explores how communicative action could meet the demand of recognition by investigating a complementary source of validity in communicative rationality, apart from Habermas' validity claims, in which ‘inter’ is better characterized as mutuality than as symmetry. By recognizing both sources of validity, communicative action can open the door more fully to all aspects of recognition without giving up its universal pragmatic core. Key Words: communicative action • communicative rationality • discourse ethics • Jürgen Habermas • Axel Honneth • recognition • universal pragmatics.

This book offers an excellent analysis of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. It has two distinct but complementary focuses. In the first part, the conception of communicative rationality at the basis of Habermas’s theory of action is confronted with the conception of instrumental rationality that is predominant in the social sciences: rational choice theory. The main focus of this analysis is to evaluate the plausibility of one central claim of Habermas’s theory, namely, that communicative rationality is irreducible to instrumental rationality and thus constitutes a necessary element of a general theory of rationality. Although Heath’s analysis confirms the correctness of Habermas’s claim, it does so on the basis of a command of decision and game theory, the sophistication of which goes well beyond anything that Habermas himself (and most of his commentators) have so far actually provided. This is undoubtedly one of the most important achievements of the book. For it offers the so far missing argumentative step from the intuitiveness of Habermas’s irreducibility claim to a careful demonstration of what it is exactly about linguistic communication that cannot be modeled instrumentally. Moreover, this careful demonstration includes a very interesting and equally sophisticated analysis of the implications of Habermas’s theory for the philosophy of language, which so far has received too little attention by most of Habermas’s commentators.

Jurgen Habermas is a second-generation social philosopher of the Frankfurt school, the birthplace of critical theory. He suggests that modernity is a project of substituting rationality for religion. In his analysis, such a succession is the result of a process of social evolution, in which each developmental stage has its basic concepts and modes of understanding subjective, objective, and social worlds. For him, the salient feature of rationality consists of differentiation between various validity claims of truth, truthfulness, and sincerity which are indistinguishable in religious language. The rationalization of religion, hence, progresses in terms of a differentiation between validity claims, a decentration of human understanding, the disenchantment of the world, and the linguistification of the sacred. Habermas proposes a universal pragmatics in which two modes of language use are separated: instrumental-strategic, and communicative. He thinks that the failure of the enlightenment movement to replace religion with reason stems from its preoccupation with instrumental reason and language use, dispensing with communicative rationality; and the remedy lies in communicative rationality.

The thesis of "Freedom of Communicative Action" is that Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action illuminated the deep structure of the First Amendment freedom of speech. Haberams's theory takes speech act theory as its point of departure. Communicative action coordinates indivudal behavior through rational understanding. Communicative action is distinguished from strategic action--the use of communication to manipulate, deceive, or coerce. Part I offers an introduction. Part II outlines a hermeneutic approach to interpretation of the First Amendent. Part III explores and criticizes existing theories of the freedom of speech. Part IV explicates Habermas's theory of communicative action. Part V developes a theory of the freedom of expression based on Habermas's theory of communication. Part VI applies that theory to particular problems in free speech doctrine. Part VII draws some conclusions about the implications of this exercise for the development of doctrine and the theory of communicative action. "Freedom of Communicative Action" was published in 1989, and some of the views expressed in the article are no longer affirmed by the author.

Although the success of Habermas’s theory of communicative action depends on his dialogical model of understanding in which a theorist is supposed to participate in the debate with the actors as a ‘virtual participant’ and seek context-transcendent truth through the exchange of speech acts, current literature on the theory of communicative action rarely touches on the difficulties it entails. In the first part of this paper, I will examine Habermas’s argument that understanding other cultural practices requires the interpreter to virtually participate in the “dialogue” with the actors as to the rationality of their cultural practice and discuss why, according to Habermas,such dialogue leads to the “context-transcendent truth”. In the second part, by using a concrete historical example, I will reconstruct a “virtual dialogue” between Habermas and Michael Polanyi as to the rationality of scientific practice and indicate why Habermas’s dialogical model of understanding based on the methodology of virtual participation cannot achieve what it professes to do.

Habermas has argued that many of the endemic socio- economic problems of Western society are either symptoms or prod ucts of a 'lopsided' process of cultural rationalization, one that has emphasized instrumental forms of rationality over communicative. But other than presenting a rather general typology of lifeworld pathologies, Habermas has not done much to specify what these problems might be, nor has he provided any 'middle-range' analysis of the mechanisms through which they might be generated. This paper discusses some of the ways in which, consistent with Haber mas's general framework, rational choice theory can be used for pre cisely this task. In this analysis, rational choice theory is not presented as a comprehensive theory of action, but is employed as a critical- diagnostic tool that allows the theorist to identify undesirable social interaction patterns that arise from a broader instrumentalization of the lifeworld. Key Words: critical theory • Habermas • instrumental rationality • market failure • rational choice theory.