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. (shrink)

His Paulskirche speech on October 14, 2001, marked Habermas’s turn to public criticism of the unilateral politics of global hegemony as he promoted a globaldomestic and human rights policy. Two years later he joined ranks with Jacques Derrida against the eight “new” Europeans who lent signatures to the second Gulf War. Lest we misjudge the joint letter by Habermas and Derrida as peculiarly Eurocentric and even oblivious to the worldwide nature of the antiwar protest on February 15, 2003, we must (...) read their new alliance in the context of its emergence: Derrida and Habermas introduce a corrective that neither invokes the geographical heart of Europe nor the cosmopolitan westernization of the world. In this essay, first, I revisit the imaginary conversation between Habermas and Derrida from 1995. Second, I highlight the persisting differences in their post-2001 thinking, pairing up key political concepts that illustrate how each thinker hopes for that which is to come after the death of God. Third, I press ahead to a new critical theory that articulates postsecular hope after the death of God. (shrink)

This essay illustrates the kind of moral analysis Jeffrey Stout advocates in "Democracy and Tradition" by way of examining a conversation among Muslims that took place between June and December 2002. Their debate centers on al-Qaìda's legitimacy as God's chosen defender of Islam, which is called into question due to the tension between al-Qaìda's military tactics and the concepts of honorable combat held within the Islamic tradition. This giving and taking of reasons in both defense and detraction of al-Qaìda's tactics (...) demonstrates the living reality of Islamic tradition--the ongoing process of striving to discern God's will in light of communal agreements about the authority of certain texts and the validity of established rules for interpreting them. (shrink)

Modern analytical just war theory starts with Michael Walzer's defense of key tenets of the laws of war in his Just and Unjust Wars. Walzer advocates noncombatant immunity, proportionality, and combatant equality: combatants in war must target only combatants; unintentional harms that they inflict on noncombatants must be proportionate to the military objective secured; and combatants who abide by these principles fight permissibly, regardless of their aims. In recent years, the revisionist school of just war theory, led by Jeff McMahan, (...) has radically undermined Walzer's defense of these principles. This essay situates Walzer's and the revisionists’ arguments, before illustrating the disturbing vision of the morality of war that results from revisionist premises. It concludes by showing how broadly Walzerian conclusions can be defended using more reliable foundations. (shrink)