Ingram, David. Review of Barbara Fultner, ed. JURGEN HABERMAS: KEY CONCEPTS. NDPR (May 2011).

Fultner, Barbara, ed.  Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts.  Chesham: Acumen, 2011.

Anyone who has read Habermas knows how daunting his writing can be. Aside from the notorious density and abstractness of his prose, there is the challenge posed by the sheer scope of his undertaking. Quite simply, he stands out among our great contemporary thinkers for having dared to write a system of philosophy that crosses both disciplinary and thematic boundaries. In addition to this challenge, his thought has undergone several major permutations and countless minor ones over the past half century, as evidenced by the thirty some odd books and collections he has authored.

So we are truly fortunate that Acumen chose to include a book on Habermas in its exceptional Key Concepts series. These volumes are designed to provide synoptic introductions to important thinkers. This volume, edited by the well-known Habermas translator and scholar, Barbara Fultner, is a fine addition to the series. The essays included in this volume are written by eminent specialists in their respective fields, many of whom studied with Habermas. They are uniformly of high quality, and most are written at a level that upper-division undergraduates should find accessible. Furthermore, although most of them present a sympathetic case for Habermas's ambitious undertaking, they do not shy away from noting potential weaknesses. In short, this is about as complete an account of Habermas's social philosophy as one might possibly expect from a modestly sized volume. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23629.

"Global Perspectives on Habermas," University of Groningen, April 27-28, 2011.

[This conference is over but the information might still be useful to some.]

WEDNESDAY 27 APRIL

ZITTINGSZAAL (FACULTY OF THEOLOGY, OUDE BOTERINGESTRAAT 38)

9.00 Welcome
9.30 Prof Joost Herman, University of Groningen: Globalisation Studies
9.45 Dr Vivienne Matthies-Boon and Dr Andrej Zwitter, University of Groningen: Research in Ethics and Globalisation
10.00 Dr Tom Bailey, John Cabot University and LUISS, Rome: Editor’s Introduction
11.00 Dr Vivienne Matthies-Boon, University of Groningen: Exporting Democracy to the Middle East: Habermas and Bush’s Neoconservatives (Discussant: Dr Andrej Zwitter)
12.00 Lunch
13.00 Dr Péter Losonczi, University of Antwerp: The Global Ambiguity of Habermas' Post-secular Thesis (Discussant: Dr P. Boele van Hensbroek)
14.00 Dr Kevin Gray, American University of Sharjah: What is Living and What is Dead in Habermas’ Secularization Hypothesis? (Discussant: Dr Vivienne Matthies-Boon)

15.00 Coffee break

15.30 Dara Salam, LUISS, Rome: The Diversity of Public Spheres: The Case of Iraq (Discussant: Mohamad Forough)

THURSDAY 28 APRIL
ROOM T7, TURFTORENSTRAAT (NEXT TO THE HARMONIE BUILDING)

09.00 Dr William Smith, Chinese University of Hong Kong: Deliberation Without Democracy? Reflections on Habermas, the Public Sphere and China (Discussant: Dr Frank Gaensmantel)
10.00 Dr Vincent Yohanes Jolasa, University of Indonesia: Habermas on
Distortion, Communication and Depth Hermeneutics (Discussant: Dr Timo Juetten)

11.00 Coffee break

ROOM T6, TURFTORENSTRAAT

11.30 Dr Kanchana Mahadevan, University of Mumbai: Feminist Solidarity: Communitarian Challenges and Post-national Prospects (Discussant: Prof Jaap de Wilde)
12.30 Prof Jaap de Wilde, University of Groningen: Closing remarks

12.45 Lunch

Enquiries: Tom Bailey (tbailey@johncabot.edu)

Mendieta, Eduardo. Review of David Ingram, HABERMAS. NDPR (February 2011).

Ingram, David.  Habermas: Introduction and Analysis.  Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010.

David Ingram is no neophyte to either Habermas or Frankfurt School Critical Theory. A very good argument can be made, in fact, that Ingram belongs to what has been called 'Third Generation Critical Theory.' His 1987 book, Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason, was indispensable for a new generation of scholars trying to make sense of Habermas' two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1984). Over the last two decades, in addition to editing volumes of the key writings by Frankfurt School critical theorists, he has written a series of books on democracy, rights, globalization, and cosmopolitanism that have traced a distinctive contribution to a more radical understanding of deliberative democracy. Such a sustained engagement with Habermas' work, in particular, and Critical Theory, in general, explains why this book is not simply an introduction.

In fact, more than an "introduction and analysis," it can be said that it is also an immanently critical assessment of Habermas' transformation of Critical Theory. In this sense, in as much as Critical Theory is a tradition whose major task is the immanent critique of reason, Ingram's book is also a contribution to the Critical Theory tradition. Ingram's book is without question the most comprehensive presentation of Habermas' corpus to date. The book is made up of eleven dense yet also clear chapters on different aspects of Habermas' thinking. Ingram is right to claim that at the heart of Habermas' system is his conception of universal pragmatics (p. 72). Universal pragmatics is the caldron in which the linguist turn of early twentieth-century philosophy was melted with action theory and functional systems analysis to provide us with a thoroughly linguistic understanding of reason. At the heart of universal pragmatics is Habermas' analysis of speech acts and the different validity claims that are raised in their performance. The chapters in which Ingram explains and reconstructs Habermas' analysis of the linguistic character of human rationality are surely some of the best I have read, not simply for how comprehensive they are but also because they do not shy away from explicit discussion of objections and problems that Habermas has either failed to address or has subsequently addressed. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22890.

Fish, Stanley. "Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?" NEW YORK TIMES April 12, 2010.

Habermas, Jurgen. An Awareness of What is Missing. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment rationality that has been attacked both by postmodernism, which derides formal reason’s claims of internal coherence and neutrality, and by various fundamentalisms, which subordinate reason to religious imperatives that sweep everything before them, often not stopping at violence. In his earlier work, Habermas believed, as many did, that the ambition of religion to provide a foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance could now, in the Modern Age, be fulfilled by the full development of human rational capacities harnessed to a “discourse ethics” that admitted into the conversation only propositions vying for the status of “better reasons,” with “better” being determined by a free and open process rather than by presupposed ideological or religious commitments: “the authority of the holy,” he once declared, “is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus.” In recent years, however, Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.” The question of course is what does Habermas mean by “introduce”? How exactly is the cooperation between secular reason and faith to be managed? Habermas attempted to answer that question in the course of a dialogue with four Jesuit academics who met with him in Munich in 2007. The proceedings have now been published. . . . Read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/does-reason-know-what-it-is-missing/.

Audio: "Rethinking Secularism: Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor in Conversation," November 20, 2009.

This is audio and a transcript of the October 22 discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, moderated by Craig Calhoun, in which the two leading philosophers discuss the place of religion in the public sphere and whether there are differences in kind between religious and secular reasons. Visit: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/20/rethinking-secularism-jurgen-habermas-and-charles-taylor-in-conversation/ Listen to the paper presentations that preceded this discussion here: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/02/rethinking-secularism-audio/. Add your own voice to the discussion here https://mail.cavehill.uwi.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/10/23/the-power-of-religion-in-the-public-sphere-open-thread/

Dallmayr, Fred. Review of Nikolas Kompridis' CRITIQUE AND DISCLOSURE. NDPR (February (2009).

Kompridis, Nikolas. Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. The fate of reason today hangs in the balance. This is no small matter. Ever since its historical beginnings, reason or rationality has been the central focus and point of honor of Western modernity -- a focus enshrined in Descartes' cogito, Enlightenment rationalism, and Kantian (and neo-Kantian) critical philosophy. The result of this focus was an asymmetrical dichotomy: separated from the external world of "matter" (or nature), the cogito assumed the role of superior task master and overseer -- a role fueling the enterprise of modern science and technology. During the past century, the edifice of Western modernity has registered a trembling, due to both internal and external contestations. Subverting the modern asymmetry, a host of thinkers – with views ranging from American pragmatism to European life philosophy and phenomenology -- have endeavored to restore pre-cognitive "experience" (including sense perception and affect) to its rightful place. In the context of French "postmodernism," a prominent battle cry has been to dislodge "logocentrism" (the latter term often equated with anthropocentrism). In the ambiance of recent German philosophy, the battle lines have been clearly marked: pitting champions of modern rationalism, represented by Jürgen Habermas, against defenders of experiential "world disclosure," represented by Martin Heidegger. In his book, Nikolas Kompridis endeavors to shed new light on this controversy, with the aim not so much of bringing about a cease fire but of providing resources for arriving at better mutual understanding. Kompridis does not exactly assume a position above the contestants (he repeatedly rejects the "view from nowhere"). As the book's subtitle indicates, his point of departure is "critical theory" as championed by the Frankfurt School, and his attempt is to nudge that theory beyond a certain rationalist orthodoxy in the direction of possible "future" horizons. While appreciating some of its merits -- such as the "linguistic turn" and the emphasis on "communicative" rationality -- Kompridis finds Habermas's reformulation of the Frankfurt program on the whole unhelpful and debilitating. In his words (p. 17): "For all there is to recommend it, Habermas's reformulation has produced a split between new and old critical theory so deep that the identity and future of critical theory are at risk." The main reason is that the "normative gain" deriving from the linguistic turn remains attached to narrow rationalist premises that have "needlessly devalued" the theory's potential. In Kompridis's view, Habermas's evolving thought exhibits a break or rupture (quite apart from the linguistic turn): namely, a move toward pure "theory" which happened soon after the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests. "That turn to theory," he writes (pp. 232-234), "refashioned the project of critical theory as a strenge Wissenschaft, less bound by or beholden to the historical and existential exigencies of modernity" -- thereby undermining modernity's intrinsic "relation to time." As a result of this refashioning, critical theory was catapulted in the direction of an abstractly rational universalism disdainful of cultural and practical modes of pluralism. The upshot was a growing "insensitivity to particularity," justifying the suspicion that the basic concepts of communicative rationality had from the start been "rigged in favor of the universal." But, the book adds sharply, "a provinciality-destroying reason is a meaning-destroying reason" and the latter is "a history-destroying reason." Considerations of this kind serve to buttress the book's basic "thesis" (p. 17) that Habermas's reformulation is "in need of urgent reassessment if critical theory is to have a future worthy of its past." In Kompridis's view (pp. 28-29), critical theory's renewal has to rely on alternative resources, including insights "central to the German tradition from Hegel to Heidegger and Adorno" and phenomenological explorations of the "life-world." In this context, a crucial resource is Heidegger's notion of "world disclosure," articulated variously under the labels of "Erschlossenheit," "Lichtung," and "Ereignis." The basic point of the notion of disclosure is that "we operate 'always already' with a pre-reflective, holistically structured, and grammatically regulated understanding of the world" (pp. 32-33) -- which means that our thinking and reasoning is always embedded in a pre-cognitive experiential setting. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15167.

Wisnewski, J. Jeremy. "Review of Amy Allen's THE POLITICS OF OUR SELVES." NDPR May 17, 2008.

Allen, Amy. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. The Politics of Our Selves begins by rethinking the Foucault/Habermas debate -- a debate that centers on the place of critique in the network of power. In reading Foucault's work, where power 'is everywhere' and is that in virtue of which agents are constructed and placed within systems of normalization and subordination, a persistent worry seems to arise: if power is absolutely everywhere, how is it possible to engage in the critique of power in such a way that we might (at least partially) liberate ourselves from the oppressive aspects of power? If power pervades everything, it follows that it pervades rationality, and hence that the use of rationality itself is riddled with the very means of subordination we are trying to overcome. It is precisely this criticism that has been leveled against the Foucaultian enterprise by philosophers like Habermas and Charles Taylor. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13085.