The aim of the paper is to present a brief insight into the significant works and views of the German sociologists Niklas Luhmann and Jűrgen Habermas on the role of law in regulating human relations in society. Educated as a lawyer, Niklas Luhmann in the late academic career was under the influence of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons. Niklas Luhmann later, under the influence of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, he built a sociological theoretical system called the systems theory. On (...) the other side, Jűrgen Habermas was a philosopher and sociologist, highly influenced by the Frankfurt school of sociology. According to Luhmann‘s systems theory, the social reality and the separate aspects of the social life are part of a deeper system called society, and in relation to the same they are set as subsystems. Social systems are divided into allopoietic and autopoietic. One of the significant axioms of Luhmann’s theory is that the largest number of systems tends to simplify due to the pressure of the environment for greater efficiency. Law in Luhman’s systems theory enjoys the status of an autonomous system for regulating society, rather than an instrumental contribution to politics. This brief review exposed a big clash between two influential German thinkers. In this paper we are going to use historical method and analysing of the content of different materials and previous authors that are dealing with the work of Niklas Luhmann and Jűrgen Habermas. (shrink)

In modern continental thought, natural science is widely portrayed as an exclusively instrumental mode of reason. The breadth of this consensus has partly preempted the question of how it came to persuade. The process of persuasion, as it played out in Germany, can be explored by reconstructing the intellectual exchanges among three twentieth-century theorists of science, Heidegger, Habermas, and Werner Heisenberg. Taking an iconic Heisenberg as a kind of limiting case of “the scientist,” Heidegger and Habermas each found themselves driven (...) to place new constraints on their previously more capacious assessments of science, especially its capacity to reflect on its method. Tracing how that happened, through archival and historical contextualization and close readings of their texts, lets us make visible Heidegger and Habermas’s intellectual affinities and argumentative parallels, which derived not only from their shared grounding in earlier reactions against positivism, but also from confrontation with contemporary events. The latter included, for Heidegger, the rise of a technically powerful science exemplified by nuclear physics, and for Habermas, post-World War II controversies over science, technology, and their socially critical possibilities. (shrink)

This article explores critiques and reformulations of Habermas’s concept of communicative action as presented by feminist authors. Numerous articles considering communicative action as developed by Habermas from a feminist perspective have been published, but no systematic analysis of these arguments exists. This article aims to fill the gap by providing an examination of various readings of communicative action from a feminist standpoint. If, on one hand, the article collects the dispersed feminist critique of communicative action and offers insight into feminist (...) argumentation, its aim is, on the other hand, to reflect the critique itself. Therefore, attention is devoted both to feminist readings of communicative action, as well as to the potential shortcomings of these readings that are detected by a closer examination of Habermas’s own works. The article’s aim is also to show how feminist critics, in their interpretations and reformulations of communicative action, focus on an explication of the inclusive elements of communicative action. (shrink)