Online research in philosophy

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important thinkers of this century. His work has been highly influential not only in philosophy, but particularly in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection that explores the connections between his body of work and North America's biggest philosophical movement, pragmatism. Habermas and Pragmatism investigates the influences of pragmatism on Habermas' thought in a collection of stellar essays with contributions by Habermas himself, leading representatives of pragmatism, as well as critical and legal theorists. The essays cover a range of subjects including philosophy of language, democracy, nature of rationality and social theory as well as the relation of major figures such as Hegel, Pierce, Mead and Dewey to Habermas and pragmatism.

deserves to be reappraised for a number of reasons. Prevailing conceptions of strong transcendental arguments, which inform many of his critics, cannot be sustained. The analytic reception of Kant suggests a more modest role for them that is remarkably similar to Habermas's claims for the paradigm of rational reconstruction. Hence a reinterpretation of transcendentalism provides a new basis for establishing a continuity between his early and later work. Habermas's underlying argument structure owes much, albeit unconsciously, to Kant's concept of a regulative idea. Only the "as if" status of regulative ideas allows one to make sense of the metacritical structure of KHI and Habermas's transcendental arguments emerge as deeply hermeneutic in character rather than logical in any formal sense.

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.

v. 1. The engagement with postmodernity and phenomenology. Hermeneutics and epistemology. Metaphysics -- v. 2. Normativity and reason. Discourse ethics -- v. 3. Law, democracy, and the public sphere. Cosmopolitanism and the nation state -- v. 4. Habermas and psychology. Habermas and bioethics. Habermas and feminism. Aesthetics. Habermas and religion. Habermas and science.

Habermas and Brandom remain divided on a key point in their theories of language concerning the priority of a participant vs. a third-person, observational perspective onto language. I examine this dispute as it has played out in a recent exchange between them, attempting to explicate and defend a qualified version of Habermas’s claim in the light of his more developed treatment of this issue elsewhere. Once the defensible content of Habermas’s claim is clarified, I argue that Habermas’s critique of Brandom highlights an important way in which Brandom fails to follow through adquately in the development of his own understanding of language as a distinctively social practice. The value in Habermas’s criticism of Brandom’s work lies not in exposing an unbridgeable gulf between their two positions, but in helping us to work out more consistently the social perspective onto language that informs both their work.

Language-Game vs. Complete Language. The article formulates a criticism of Wittgenstein's later philosophy which, in its substance, I would like to think, is fairly the same as the (hermeneutic) criticism issued by Apel and Habermas in the sixties. Contrary to these philosophers, however, I try to make the point by focusing on the distinction between language game and language, respectively between intralanguage relations of 'family resemblance' (between language games) and interlanguage translation relations. The notion of a 'complete language' is introduced - 'completeness' of a language being, roughly, its possibility in principle of being translated into any (other) language - and the criticism of Wittgenstein is formulated as the allegation that he does not, or will not, acknowledge such a concept of completeness. So far the contents of the first part of the article. The rest of it assembles some hints, remarks and reminders which bear upon the question of the 'completeness' of a language. These considerations include comments on the conditions of translatability, on the performative (agent's) knowledge or 'intention-in-action' of the acting person, on Habermas' concept of communicative competence and on the notion of a responsible subject of action. It is alleged that to speak of 'translation' and 'reporting an event' as language games is misleading.

Poetic Interaction presents an original approach to the history of philosophy in order to elaborate a fresh theory that accounts for the place freedom in the Western philosophical tradition. In his thorough analysis of the aesthetic theories of Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant, John McCumber shows that the interactionist perspective recently put forth by Jürgen Habermas was in fact already present in some form in the German Enlightenment and in Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology. McCumber's historical placement of the interactionist perspective runs counter to both Habermas's own views and to those of scholars who would locate the origin of these developments in American pragmatism. From the metaphysical approaches of Plato and Aristotle to the interactionist approaches of Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer, McCumber provides an original narrative of the history of philosophy that focuses on the ways that each thinker has formulated the relationships between language, truth, and freedom. Finally, McCumber presents his critical demarcation of various forms of freedom to reveal that the interactionist approach has to be expanded and enlarged to include all that is understood by "poetic interaction." For McCumber, freedom is inherently pluralistic. Poetic Interaction will be invaluable to political philosophers, historians of philosophy, philosophers of language, and scholars of legal criticism.