Reviews for Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference "Kierkegaard and the Meaning It" Copenhagen, may 5-9, 1996

The average rating for Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference "Kierkegaard and the Meaning It" Copenhagen, may 5-9, 1996 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-14 00:00:00 Jaiye Ayling Jürgen Habermas is a difficult thinker to approach for the first time. Although English-speaking students of philosophy know him primarily as a moral theorist, his writings on morality actually represent only a fraction of the much broader research programme that he undertook with the Theory of Communicative Action (1981) nearly 40 years ago. In fact, the discourse theory of morality which has become synonymous with Habermas's name is completely inseparable from the theory of modernity and the social ontology that preceded it. Add to this the encyclopedic breadth of his knowledge and the opacity of his language and you have an very daunting first read. English-speaking readers looking to broach Habermas's discourse theory for the first time would do well to supplement his own writings on the subject with William Rehg's Insight and Solidarity. Not only does Rehg make the discourse theory of morality more accessible to the English-speaking public by putting it into dialogue with some of its most important rivals in Anglo-American philosophy, but his own exposition is often clearer and more systematic than Habermas's own. The broad outlines of Habermas's theory are easy enough to grasp. As diverse as they may be, all human forms of life are necessarily structured by the structures of communication oriented toward mutual understanding. This is what Habermas calls "communicative action." Subjects engaging in communicative action raise various kinds of validity claims. These include claims to normative validity associated with various kinds of social norms like legal and moral norms. A claim to normative validity is equivalent to the claim that the norm in question rests on mutually convincing reasons that can be produced if need be. In the case of a moral norm, which is intended to be universal in scope, this claim entails that the norm is in the equal interest of all affected parties. This universalistic demand introduce certain idealizations into moral discourse: that no point of view may be suppressed, that all claims must be admitted into discourse, and that no claim may be immune from criticism. These then provide the grounds for social criticism by allowing us to identify various forms of exclusion and repression. The finer details of this account, however, often remain vague. The plausibility of Habermas's theory largely hinges on his attempt to derive a vaguely Kantian principle of universalization from the transcendental conditions of participation in moral discourse. However, the proposed derivation has come under heavy fire from commentators since the Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983) at the very least. The plausibility of the theory also depends on his genealogical account of the development of the universal egalitarianism as part of a culturally neutral social learning process. Rehg does a remarkable job not only of clarifying these and other moves, but also of making them plausible whenever possible. After dedicating Part One of the book to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of Habermas's argument, he spends Parts Two and Three defending it against the two rival approaches that have been most critical not only of Habermas's discourse theory, but of universalist and liberal theories in general, namely communitarianism and the ethics of care. Habermas's discourse theory of morality follows John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness in drawing a sharp distinction between the right and the good The right here refers to norms of justice applying to all citizens, whereas the good refers to the diverse and incompatible evaluations and interpretations that make up their respective understandings of a life worth living. The communitarian line of thought'represented principally by Charles Taylor and Alisdair MacIntyre'rejects this distinction, as well as the priority of the right over the good posited by all forms of moral universalism. MacIntyre notoriously argues that no normative justification is possible without some shared view of the good, on the basis of which alone agreement can be reached. Taylor goes further, claiming that Habermas's theory itself privileges a certain kind of good'namely, the good of harmonious conflict-resolution'to the detriment of other, equally valuable goods. Rehg devotes a great deal of Part Two to defending Habermas's discourse theory against these attacks. Habermas's account of the emergence of modern universalism at the same time commits him to a particular understanding of the institution morality. For him, morality is expressed by principles that raise a claim to being normatively valid across temporal and cultural barriers. This has exposed him to several other criticisms. Theorists of the ethics of care, who often hold up relations of friendship or motherly affection as exemplars of moral life, routinely criticize Kantian and Utilitarian systems of morality for being unable to take into account the intrinsic value of such relationships. In both the feminist iterations developed by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings and the post-modernist variants developed by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the ethics of care protests the abstraction of the concrete individual often associated with moral universalism. In Part Three of the book, Rehg tries to circumvent these criticisms by showing that Habermas has the resources to meet almost of the objections leveled against it by the ethics of care. Rehg's analysis of Habermas's discourse theory of morality is both meticulous and strikingly original. It has much too seldom been remarked that a central concern of Habermas's work stretching all the way back to the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) is to develop the intuition of intersubjective freedom that has served as the throughline for socialist thought since Marx at the very least. One significant merit of Rehg's book is that it provides a clear and convincing account of the notion of intersubjective insight that is the key to understanding this aspect of Habermas's thought. Another related point is that Rehg's elaboration of the role of trust sheds significant light on the relation between expert cultures and citizen opinion in a contemporary democratic society, which may well be the most pressing political question I can think of right now. Despite the considerable merits of Rehg's book, however, there are a number of points where I cannot follow him. The most notable of these is when he concedes to the Taylor that discourse theory elevates harmonious conflict-resolution to status of a "meta-value." This seems to me to miss the core epistemic thrust of Habermas's argument and to open it up to considerable objections. Even where I think Rehg is wrong, though, his contributions remain valuable springboards for reflection about some of the conundrums raised by Habermas's thought.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-18 00:00:00 Yann Roye I needed a quick introduction to Schopenhauer but this book gave me more of a chronology of his life and some quotes from him, not much substantive information on his philosophy.