This article argues for a rethinking of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of religion. Taking into consideration some of Habermas’s recent writings on the topic, it is argued that his conception of religion is untenable. Recent critical studies on the discourse of religion and its historical context have rendered the classic conception of religion suspect. Instead of describing a unique sphere of life, religion can and should be redescribed as something ordinary, embedded, and conceptually inseparable from a larger array of social imaginary (...) institutions and networks. (shrink)

In this article, I revise the normative account of sport that I proposed in ‘William J. Morgan’s “conventionalist internalism” approach. Furthering internalism? A critical hermeneutical response.’ I first present Habermas’ discursive ethics, placing emphasis on his interpretation of the relationship between moral (Kantian) and ethical (Hegelian/hermeneutical) principles. Then, I provide a reformulation of my account by both drawing on Habermas and going beyond him—as I go beyond Habermas, I will refer to the account as ‘discourse-ethics based.’ To further explore the (...) normative potential of the account, I connect its main tenets to the three main normative theories of sport (formalism, broad internalism, and deep conventionalism) and illustrate it with examples from anti-doping governance. (shrink)

John Searle has recently developed a theory of reasons for acting that intends to rescue the freedom of the will, endangered by causal determinism, whether physical or psychological. To achieve this purpose, Searle postulates a series of “gaps” that are supposed toendowthe self with free will. Reviewing key steps in Searle's argument, this article shows that such an undertaking cannot be successfully completed because of its solipsist premises. The author argues that reasons for acting do not have a subjective, I-ontology (...) but a first-person plural, Weontology that better accounts for agency and responsibility. (shrink)

: My text is written to answer the questions asked at the APA Meeting's presentation of the book Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere by professors María Lugones and Eduardo Mendieta. The answer seeks to clarify that Lugones's infrapolitics position is not so distant from mine. I also address Mendieta's question directed more to the aesthetic domain. There, I seek to show how my position could be taken as a creative effort to extend some of Habermas's early work (...) on the public sphere, and to develop the thesis of the important relations between the aesthetic and the moral realms. (shrink)

My text is written to answer the questions asked at the APA Meeting's presentation of the book Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere by professors María Lugones and Eduardo Mendieta. The answer seeks to clarify that Lugones's infrapolitics position is not so distant from mine. I also address Mendieta's question directed more to the aesthetic domain. There, I seek to show how my position could be taken as a creative effort to extend some of Habermas's early work on (...) the public sphere, and to develop the thesis of the important relations between the aesthetic and the moral realms. (shrink)

The paper is aimed at discussing two interpretations of pragmatism in a broader framework of general rules of philosophical interpretation. J. Habermas' and R. Rorty's uses of pragmatism are considered in detail and confronted with general assumptions of pragmatic philosophy. It is shown that in both cases the original ideas of pragmatism are changed in order to fit the philosophies of interpreters. The paper ends with discussion of a possibility of applying the rule of interpretative charity and dialogue to philosophical (...) analyses. Key Words: communication • dialogue • interpretation • postmodernism • pragmatism • tradition • transcendentalism. (shrink)

Despite clear parallels between Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics and recent scholarship in feminist ethics, feminists are often suspicious of discourse ethics and have kept themselves mostly separate from the field. By developing a sustained application of Habermas's discourse ethics to friendship, Keller demonstrates that feminist misgivings of discourse ethics are largely misplaced and that Habermas's theory can be used to develop a compelling moral phenomenology of interpersonal relations.

Despite clear parallels between Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics and recent scholarship in feminist ethics, feminists are often suspicious of discourse ethics and have kept themselves mostly separate from the field. By developing a sustained application of Habermas’s discourse ethics to friendship, Keller demonstrates that feminist misgivings of discourse ethics are largely misplaced and that Habermas’s theory can be used to develop a compelling moral phenomenology of interpersonal relations.

John Searle has recently developed a theory of reasons for acting that intends to rescue the freedom of the will, endangered by causal determinism, whether physical or psychological. To achieve this purpose, Searle postulates a series of "gaps" that are supposed toendowthe self with free will. Reviewing key steps in Searle's argument, this article shows that such an undertaking cannot be successfully completed because of its solipsist premises. The author argues that reasons for acting do not have a subjective, I-ontology (...) but a first-person plural, Weontology that better accounts for agency and responsibility. Key Words: free will • agency • reasons for acting • ontology. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical interpretation of the theme, point, and methodological status of Adorno’s so-called negative dialectic. The theme at issue, ‘non-identity’, comes in several varieties; and the point of Adorno’s dialectic, namely reconciliation, is multifaceted. Exploration of those topics shows that negative dialectic seques into substantive doctrines, including a version of transcendentalism and a claim about deformation. The peculiar methodological status of negative dialectic explains that adumbration. In the appraisive register, my principal contentions include these: Adorno’s transcendentalism makes (...) some sense of the aforementioned deformation claim; and negative dialectic qua method avoids mystery and metaphysical excess. (shrink)

Wisdom, Hegel famously said, only flies at dusk. For many, the evening of the liberal-democratic nation state appears to be descending in a globalizing world. This disturbing prospect invites urgent reflection on which of the potentials of this fading order ought to be carried forward. In this climate of review and reassessment, discussions that had seemed done with re-surface sharpened by fresh purpose. The following paper attempts to put new light on a once vigorous dispute between Habermas and his post-modern (...) critics over how best to weigh-up utopian energies at play in a liberal-democratic present. This was a contest distinguished by its all-or-nothing temper: either democratic Enlightenment with its commitment to rational solidarities or a Romantic enthusiasm for unreconciled particularities. I will argue that the stalemate between these two totalizing descriptions of the emancipatory potentials of modernizing processes needs to be unblocked and the debate put into motion once again. It will be argued that each offers a framework adequate to the description of only certain kinds of cultural needs. Alone, neither offers appropriate recognition of the ambiguous character of the distinctive hopes and expectations embedded in liberal democracies. (shrink)

The paper highlights a certain kind of self-falsifying utterance, which I shall call antiperformative assertions, not noted in speech-act theory thus far. By taking such assertions into account, the old question whether explicit performatives have a truth-value can be resolved. I shall show that explicit performatives are in fact self-verifyingly true, but they are not related to propositions the way ordinary assertions are; antiperformatives have the same unusual relation to propositions, but are self-falsifyingly false. Explicit performatives are speech acts performed (...) in situations where it is important that the speaker is self-reflectively aware of what he is doing in the speech act. Antiperformatives, on the other hand, are speech acts performed in situations where lack of direct self-reflectiveness is required. In order to situate performatives and antiperformatives, the analysis is embedded within a more general discussion of self-falsifying and self-verifying assertions. (shrink)

This paper is an examination of the concept of recognition and its connection with identity and respect. This is related to the question of how women are or are not adequately recognised or respected for their achievements in sport and whether eliminating sex segregation in sport is a solution. This will require an analysis of the concept of excellence in sport, as well as the relationship between fairness and inclusion in an activity that is fundamentally about bodily movement. I argue (...) that attempts to address the problem of women’s recognition in sport need to do so in ways that neither eliminate sport as a fairness regulated system for developing individual excellence in bodily movement nor that prevent women’s achievement of sporting excellence, with the regard that belongs to them. Doing this requires us to decide whether sport is about champions or about individual excellence. (shrink)

In his recent book, Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European ideas (2021), Honneth has explained how he understands the French concept of recognition. This article places Honneth's latest interpretation in the context of his long-standing and evolving engagement with French theory over several decades. Honneth acknowledges his significant debt to a French tendency to view recognition as a problem for self-realisation (and not an opportunity). Bourdieu's and Boltanski's account of how ambitions become limited by the availability of capital (...) and the internalisation of class was a major breakthrough in Honneth's intellectual development. Other formative French influences included the articulation of denigration in existentialist phenomenology, and the idea of regulative power in Foucault, with “deconstructive” asymmetrical care presented as productive but comparatively less important. The discussion also reveals why Honneth presents the “German” concept of recognition as having basic explanatory force (as an opportunity for self-realisation), and why he resists what he views as a French-influenced tendency (also present in some contemporary German critical theory) to depict recognition as ambivalent. The discussion reveals, on one hand, how working across perceived divides can be immensely productive, and, on the other hand, why a French-German divide remains entrenched in contemporary thinking. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Organization theory and business ethics are essentially the positive and normative sides of the very same coin, reflecting on how human cooperative activities are organized and how they ought to be organized respectively. It is therefore unfortunate that—due to the relatively impermeable manmade boundaries segregating the corresponding scholarly communities into separate schools and departments, professional associations, and scientific journals—the potential symbiosis between the two fields has not yet fully materialized. In this essay we make a modest attempt at establishing further (...) connectivity by surveying the terrain covered by the two disciplines jointly, as if the boundaries between them did not matter. We commence by providing a concise overview of the organization theory discipline for interested non-specialists from the field of business ethics. Next, we proceed to point out four research themes commonly investigated by members of both communities, and also a variety of organization-theoretical perspectives on each. In the final part of this essay we explore what organization theory has to offer business ethics, and what the boundaries of that potential contribution are. We warn skeptical readers in advance that the spirit and tone of our essay is most definitely upbeat, as we are convinced that the potential for symbiosis between the two fields is vast and inspiring, even though it has only been unleashed partially and incidentally thus far. (shrink)

This article analyses the transformation of the notion of Bildung that is constructed in the German human sciences. From a perspective of field theory and discourse analysis, the article reveals how the notion evolves and stabilizes during a first stage (1810–60), how it comes under pressure because of the contextual changes in a second stage (1860–1960) and how the tension increases before it is resolved by a fundamental change of the traditional notion of Bildung in a third stage (1960–99).

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, (...) transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality. (shrink)

In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of attributing responsibility and holding one another accountable, illustrating this via a discussion of legal discourse regarding the attribution of responsibility for criminal acts. I then turn to the practical limits on agents' scientific self-objectivation, limits that turn out to (...) be mirrored philosophically in the conceptual problems that plague reductionist strategies. Having shown that free will is rooted in unavoidable performative presuppositions belonging to agents' participant perspective, I then take up the difficult issue of how to reconcile an epistemic dualism of participant and observer perspectives with the assumption of ontological monism. I critically review a range of proposed physicalist solutions, including non-reductionist and (standard) compatibilist approaches. An underlying problem with scientistic, physicalist approaches is the methodological fiction of an exclusive ?view from nowhere? which relies on the problematic move of disengaging the objectivating perspective of the scientific observer from the investigators' participant perspective of those engaged in scientific practice. Since there is no way of getting around the requisite complementarity of both the observer's encounter with the objective world and the participant's involvement in shared lifeworld practices, the remaining option is to take an epistemological turn. But even the recognition that science is ultimately constituted from within the lifeworld still leaves us with the question as to how the human mind can understand itself as the product of natural evolution. I conclude with some tentative suggestions as to how this difficult question might be addressed. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} I define and refine Habermas’s notion of systematically distorted communication by means of focused, structured comparison among three of its instances. Next, I show that its critique is possible within the confines of his theory by recourse to (...) a minimalist concept of rationality and a version of the truth that avoids the unwelcome metaphysical baggage of truth with a capital T. For critique to be complete, however, it must be supplemented by the full range of rhetorical proofs. Even so, there are limits to the power of critique. In the end, only social and political action can alter oppressive institutional arrangements. (shrink)

The internet could be an efficient political instrument if it were seen as part of a democracy where free and open discourse within a vital public sphere plays a decisive role. The model of deliberative democracy, as developed by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, serves this concept of democracy best. The paper explores first the model of deliberative democracy as a ‘two-track model’ in which representative democracy is backed by the public sphere and a developing civil society. Secondly, it outlines (...) the normative concept of the public sphere and its basic ideas, namely the uncoerced communication of equal participants with equal access and equal rights to intervene or propose themes. The third part for discussion shows how the internet could fit into this concept of public sphere and influence the quality of political debates, and emphasizes the important role it can play in the political process. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Based on theoretical insights of discourse ethics as developed by Jürgen Habermas, we delineate a proposal to further develop the institutionalization of social accounting in multinational corporations (MNCs) by means of “Social Accountability 8000” (SA 8000). First, we discuss the cornerstones of Habermas's discourse ethics and elucidate how and why this concept can provide a theoretical justification of the moral point of view in MNCs. Second, the basic conception, main purpose, and implementation procedure of SA 8000 are presented. Third, we (...) critically examine SA 8000 from a Habermasian perspective, and discuss advantages and drawbacks of the initiative. Fourth, to address the drawbacks, we introduce a “discourse-ethically” extended version of SA 8000. We show that this approach is theoretically well-founded and able to overcome some of the current deficits of the certification initiative. We demonstrate that the extended version of SA 8000 can be successfully applied on a cross-cultural basis, and that our findings have significant implications for other international ethics initiatives. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Based on theoretical insights of discourse ethics as developed by Jürgen Habermas, we delineate a proposal to further develop the institutionalization of social accounting in multinational corporations (MNCs) by means of “Social Accountability 8000” (SA 8000). First, we discuss the cornerstones of Habermas's discourse ethics and elucidate how and why this concept can provide a theoretical justification of the moral point of view in MNCs. Second, the basic conception, main purpose, and implementation procedure of SA 8000 are presented. Third, we (...) critically examine SA 8000 from a Habermasian perspective, and discuss advantages and drawbacks of the initiative. Fourth, to address the drawbacks, we introduce a “discourse-ethically” extended version of SA 8000. We show that this approach is theoretically well-founded and able to overcome some of the current deficits of the certification initiative. We demonstrate that the extended version of SA 8000 can be successfully applied on a cross-cultural basis, and that our findings have significant implications for other international ethics initiatives. (shrink)

We critically assess integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) and show that the concept particularly lacks of moral justification of substantive hypernorms. By drawing on Habermasian philosophy, in particular discourse ethics and its recent application in the theory of deliberative democracy , we further advance ISCT and show that social contracting in business ethics requires a well-justified procedural rather than a substantive focus for managing stakeholder relations. We also replace the monological concept of hypothetical thought experiments in ISCT by a concept (...) of practical discourse to better govern business activities on the macro-level of organizational actors such as firms, governments, and NGOs. (shrink)

This article investigates the possibility and potential of a critical theory of nature and technology. A blind acceptance of the uninhibited development of the forces of production led traditional critical theory to neglect these areas, which it assigned to the domain of the natural sciences. The recognition that nature is socially constituted compels a reformulation of the interest in reasonable conditions that guided the older critical theory. The article asks what criteria offer themselves for determining what would be reasonable in (...) our relations both to the nature that we ourselves are, the body, as well as to the nature that we ourselves are not. Such questions might revitalize critical theory in the very moment it threatens to become historically obsolete. (shrink)

Muslim women often come to mind when we think of women and their lives between the sharp borders of sun and shadow, male/female, private/public, veiled/naked, imprisoned/liberated. However, women exposed to patriarchal patterns within different faith traditions, and within many secular contexts, have some similarities even if no group is monolithic or can be compared with other groups as if there were easy analogies. In recent years there have been strong forces in Europe, and elsewhere, that seem to have as their (...) goal to antagonize groups against each other. Jews are set up against Muslims, Christians against Muslims and vice versa. In such a situation, secularism seems to be the only positive alternative. However, the sharp border between secularism and religious traditions has also been criticized for being simplistic. The notion of intersectionality has created an awareness of the interrelatedness of multiple layers of oppression and the need to be whole as a person. This article warns against falling into simplistic categories such as those used by neo-nationalists as well as of ultraliberal neo-atheists. Secularism, culture and religion, and thus multiculturalism, need be seen in nonessential terms that honour fluidity, process, ambivalence and hybridity. In this article I want to argue that women’s religious agency intersects with education, health, economy and moral autonomy based on an affirmation of multi-layered, fluid identities. (shrink)

This essay presents a new way of conceptualizing the problem of political obligation. On the traditional ‘normativist’ framing of the issue, the primary task for theory is to secure the content and justification of political obligations, providing practically applicable moral knowledge. This paper develops an alternative, ‘pragmatist’ framing of the issue, by rehabilitating a frequently misunderstood essay by Hanna Pitkin and by recasting her argument in terms of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in recent philosophy, as articulated by Robert Brandom. From this (...) perspective, the content and justification of political obligations cannot be determined in a way that is in principle separable from their application. This casts ‘political obligation’ not as a problem to be philosophically resolved, but as a political predicament that calls for a kind of practical engagement. The merit of this perspective is to draw our attention toward the conditions under which the problem appears as a lived predicament. (shrink)

Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between Habermas and Rawls. This is partly because they give undue attention to differences between Rawls’s original position and Habermas’s principle, neither of which is germane to the actual dispute. The dispute is at bottom about how best to conceive of democratic legitimacy. Rawls indicates where the dividing issues lie when he objects that Habermas’s account of democratic legitimacy is comprehensive and his is confined to (...) the political. But his argument is vitiated by a threefold ambiguity in what he means by ‘comprehensive doctrine’. Tidying up this ambiguity helps reveal that the dispute turns on the way in which morality relates to political legitimacy. Although Habermas calls his conception of legitimate law ‘morally freestanding’, and as such distinguishes it from Kantian and natural law accounts of legitimacy, it is not as freestanding from morality as he likes to present it. Habermas’s mature theory contains conflicting claims about the relation between morality and democratic legitimacy. So there is at least one important sense in which Rawls’s charge of comprehensiveness is made to stick against Habermas’s conception of democratic legitimacy, and remains unanswered. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

Issues concerning naturalism have increasingly become the subject of philosophical reflections involving ontological, epistemological, and even ethics affairs. The most popular topic for contemporary philosophy has been the relationship between ontological results of Darwinism and epistemology. Despite the varied circumstances of its establishment, naturalism almost always produces recommendations that reflect a worldview much “weaker” (as in the case of Habermas) than the strong one more common among scientism. There are good structural reasons for this difference. The aim of this paper (...) is to elucidate some of distinctive social features of Habermas's conception of the human being and its implications in the Theory of Communicative Action (1982). Therefore, it is shown that his anthropology takes a naturalistic and Darwinist perspective in the weak naturalism perspective. In the first part, Darwin ́s legacy is analysed as a research program, and Habermas ́s studies on biological anthropology are compared with the latest research in genetics and palaeontology. In the second part, we will show Habermas's proposal to confront an epistemological dualism through a weak non‐reductionist naturalism as a critique of modern metaphysics, which structures a new pragmatic realism. (shrink)

The recovery model, as applied in mental health, is significant because it intends to foster a critical retrieval by the subject of herself as a self-determining agent of change. This paper will show that the recovery model represents an approach to caring for the self that is congruent with critical themes inherent in some forms of contemporary philosophy, particularly that of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. The paper will also consider the contribution that Habermas’ discourse ethics could make towards the (...) non-coercive, dialogical resolution of differences between clients and professionals. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that developments in transhumanist technologies may have upon human cultures (and thus upon the lifeworld), and to do so by exploring a potential debate between Habermas and the transhumanists. Transhumanists, such as Nick Bostrom, typically see the potential in genetic and other technologies for positively expanding and transcending human nature. In contrast, Habermas is a representative of those who are fearful of this technology, suggesting that it will compound the deleterious (...) effects of the colonisation of the lifeworld, further constraining human autonomy and undermining the meaningfulness of the lifeworld by expanding the technological control and manipulation of humanity. It will be argued that these opposed positions are grounded in fundamentally different understandings of the consequences of scientific and technological advance. On one level, the transhumanists remain confident that the lifeworld has within it the resources necessary to find meaning and purpose in a society deeply infused by genetic technology. Habermas disagrees. On another level, the difference is articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, primarily by challenging what may be understood as a Baconian faith in science as a project for the domination of nature (where nature is an infinitely malleable material, to be dominated and shaped, without adverse consequences, purely for the purposes of human survival). While the transhumanists broadly embrace this faith, Habermas returns to something akin to Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic scepticism. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that developments in transhumanist technologies may have upon human cultures, and to do so by exploring a potential debate between Habermas and the transhumanists. Transhumanists, such as Nick Bostrom, typically see the potential in genetic and other technologies for positively expanding and transcending human nature. In contrast, Habermas is a representative of those who are fearful of this technology, suggesting that it will compound the deleterious effects of the colonisation of (...) the lifeworld, further constraining human autonomy and undermining the meaningfulness of the lifeworld by expanding the technological control and manipulation of humanity. It will be argued that these opposed positions are grounded in fundamentally different understandings of the consequences of scientific and technological advance. On one level, the transhumanists remain confident that the lifeworld has within it the resources necessary to find meaning and purpose in a society deeply infused by genetic technology. Habermas disagrees. On another level, the difference is articulated by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, primarily by challenging what may be understood as a Baconian faith in science as a project for the domination of nature. While the transhumanists broadly embrace this faith, Habermas returns to something akin to Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic scepticism. (shrink)

Although Jürgen Habermas has a strong argument to link reason and philosophy, he also thinks that religion has a legitimate place in the (rational) public sphere. The question, though, is: what does this legitimate place entail? Is the power of religious language due to the fact that modern culture is not sufficiently secularized, that is, not yet sufficiently philosophic? Or is the power of religious language due to the fact that it successfully articulates certain widely shared moral (and substantive) intuitions? (...) In addressing these questions, this contribution has four parts. In the first section the issue of Critical Theory and religion will be briefly examined. The point here is that where religion (like aesthetics) plays a more central role amongst the thinkers of the first movement of Critical Theory (theorists such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin), this is not the case with Habermas (the leading exponent of the second movement). In the second section, this aspect is further explored by reconstructing Habermas’s intellectual project (with its religious implications) in six steps. Finally (in the third and fourth sections) some critical remarks (inter-paradigmatic and extra-paradigmatic) will be made on Habermas’s view of religion. (shrink)

Should religious reasons be used in political discourse? Habermas argues that religious reasons can enter the public sphere so long as they undergo a translation that meets the standards of public reason. I argue that such a translation may be either unnecessary or impossible. Habermas does not sufficiently consider the possibility that religious reasons are already publicly accessible such that no translation is required. Moreover, Habermas entirely fails to consider the possibility that, if he is right about religious reasons not (...) being publicly accessible, these reasons may be of a kind such that they cannot be translated into a publicly accessible idiom as he supposes they can be. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates Habermas's communicative ethic in relation to changes in the roles of institutions and the state. I reference Alexy, Weber and Taylor, arguing that an artificial delimitation of the public sphere as disparate from the private or religious cramps the capacity of those identified as outsiders to communicate within it. I question the ability of public reason as Habermas has outlined it to meet the challenges it faces regarding interreligious dialogue and integration in democratic societies, and I suggest, (...) instead, an approach more open to dialogue with religions in terms that are more comprehensible to them. (shrink)

Authority figures permeate our daily lives, particularly, our political lives. What makes authority legitimate? The current debates about the legitimacy of authority are characterised by two opposing strategies. The first establish the legitimacy of authority on the basis of the content of the authority’s command. That is, if the content of the commands meet some independent normative standard then they are legitimate. However, there have been many recent criticisms of this strategy which focus on a particular shortcoming – namely, its (...) seeming inability to account for who can legitimately command whom. This is the basis of the second strategy, which attempts to characterize the normative relationship that underlies and makes possible authoritative commands. The central point of Part I is that these two strategies are, in fact, not opposed and both raise questions which a theory of legitimacy must answer. If this is the case, then we need to ask: how ought we to determine the legitimacy both of the content of commands as well as who can command whom? Part II will answer this question. Starting with the question of standing, I argue that we ought not to look for normative principles outside of the institutions in which authority is embedded. Rather, one ought to start by elaborating the ontology of institutions in which a sui generis form of normativity arises. A joint commitment account of social ontology provides the tools necessary to see how the direction obligations emerge concurrently with the formation of institutions. Similarly, the question of content can be answered by paying close attention to the social ontology of institutions. We need not look beyond the internal constitutive standards of the institution itself. The constitutive standards provide an internal criterion by which the legitimacy of commands can be established. (shrink)

In Jacobsen, M.H. (ed.): Sociologies of the Unnoticed. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008.

The paper concentrates on two questions: first, the problem of how to introduce students to philosophical argument in a contextualised and pluralist manner; and, second, the question of what kind of texts such a pedagogy requires at its disposal. The two questions are of course intimately related, as the dominance of the single-aim present-centred approach brings with it a highly selective publication of the archive, in editions typically suited to the aims of rational reconstruction rather than historical investigation.