This book is the first book-length deconstructive study of the political philosophy of Jürgen Habermas. Inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida, the book applies deconstruction to key issues in Habermas’s work: rational discourse and rational consensus, constitutional democracy, tolerance and civil disobedience. The war in Iraq brought Habermas and Derrida together in defense of international law and in favor of a bigger role for a united Europe in international affairs. Yet, despite the rapprochement between Habermas and Derrida in the years prior to Derrida’s death, important differences remain between Habermas’s critical theory and Derrida’s deconstruction. These differences reflect differences between post-structuralism and critical theory and between postmodernists and the defenders of modernity.
Jürgen Habermas' work ranges across critical theory, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of science, citizenship and democracy, religion and psychoanalysis, forging new paradigms and engaging with other key thinkers. Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed is the ideal starting point for anyone studying Habermas. It follows Habermas's critical and philosophical project through all the stages of its development - the early critical theory, the linguistic turn, communicative action and discourse ethics, the theory of deliberative democracy -building up a complete overview of his work, and offering close and incisive analysis throughout.
Our political climate is increasingly characterised by hostility towards constructed others. Steven Gormley answers the question: what does it mean to do justice to others? He pursues this question by developing a critical, but productive, dialogue between deliberative theory and deconstruction. Two key claims emerge from this. First: doing justice to the other demands that we maintain an ethos of interruption. And secondly: Such an ethos requires a democratic form of politics. In developing this account, Gormley places deliberative theory and deconstruction into critical conversation with the work of Mouffe, Aristotle, Rorty, Laclau and different traditions of critical theory.
In this exciting new work, Miriam Bankovsky shows how the pursuit of justice requires two orientations. The first is a practical commitment to the possibility of justice, which is the clear starting point for the broadly constructive theories of Rawls, Habermas and Honneth. Indeed, if justice were not possible, it would be difficult to see why it is worthwhile for human beings to live on this earth. However, a second orientation qualifies the first. It can be expressed as a deconstructive attentiveness to the impossibility of determining justice's content. This impossibility results from the tension between the appeal for individual consideration and the appeal for impartiality, demands that Derrida believes our historical concept of justice includes. Framed by these two orientations, this ambitious book explores the promise and shortcomings of the constructive theories. Attentive to concrete experiences of injustice that these thinkers tend to overlook, Bankovsky provocatively challenges Rawls' account of civil disobedience, Habermas' defence of rational consensus, and Honneth's ideal of mutual recognition, providing new insights into deconstruction's relevance for contemporary theories of justice.
The idea for Philosophy in a Time of Terror was born hours after the attacks on 9/11 and was realized just weeks later when Giovanna Borradori sat down with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York City, in separate interviews, to evaluate the significance of the most destructive terrorist act ever perpetrated. This book marks an unprecedented encounter between two of the most influential thinkers of our age as here, for the first time, Habermas and Derrida overcome their mutual antagonism and agree to appear side by side. As the two philosophers disassemble and reassemble what we think we know about terrorism, they break from the familiar social and political rhetoric increasingly polarized between good and evil. In this process, we watch two of the greatest intellects of the century at work.
This volume addresses some of the most prominent questions in contemporary bioethics and philosophy of medicine: ‘liberal’ eugenics, enhancement, the normal and the pathological, the classification of mental illness, the relation between genetics, disease and the political sphere, the experience of illness and disability, and the sense of the subject of bioethical inquiry itself. All of these issues are addressed from a “continental” perspective, drawing on a rich tradition of inquiry into these questions in the fields of phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, French epistemology, critical theory and post-structuralism. At the same time, the contributions engage with the Anglo-American debate, resulting in a fruitful and constructive conversation that not only shows the depth and breadth of continental perspectives in bioethics and medicine, but also opens new avenues of discussion and exploration. For decades European philosophers have offered important insights into the relation between the practices of medicine, the concept of illness, and society more broadly understood. These interventions have generally striven to be both historically nuanced and accessible to non-experts. From Georges Canguilhem’s seminal The Normal and the Pathological, Michel Foucault’s lectures on madness, sexuality, and biopolitics, Hans Jonas’s deeply thoughtful essays on the right to die, life extension, and ethics in a technological age, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s lectures on The Enigma of Health, and more recently Jürgen Habermas’s carefully nuanced interventions on the question of liberal eugenics, these thinkers have sought to engage the wider public as much as their fellow philosophers on questions of paramount importance to current bioethical and social-political debate. The essays contained here continue this tradition of engagement and accessibility. In the best practices of European philosophy, the contributions in this volume aim to engage with and stimulate a broad spectrum of readers, not just experts. In doing so the volume offers a showcase of the richness and rigor of continental perspectives on medicine and society.
This timely book explores the extent to which national security has affected the intersection between human rights and the exercise of state power. It examines how liberal democracies, long viewed as the proponents and protectors of human rights, have transformed their use of human rights on the global stage, externalizing their own internal agendas.
For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say.The Eyes of the People examines democracy from the perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time.In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian" alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers-including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others-Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control.The Eyes of the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy within the sociological and technological conditions of the twenty-first century.
The controversy over Jacques Derrida's legacy is one of the most effective engines driving the contemporary debate, far beyond the bounds of philosophy. By now, the variety of contesting positions is so wide that it calls for a critical assessment to achieve a unified theoretical scheme. The dyad of deconstruction and reconstruction, to which the title of the volume refers, aims at composing a kind of map of this debate. The three sections of the book include essays that investigate specific aspects of Derrida's reception, from the view of 1. philosophy, 2. literary studies and 3. politics and law. These contributions study the implications of deconstruction beyond its original scope and intervene by taking stock of its most relevant aporias.
A Balanced Epistemological Orientation for the Social Sciences challenges social researchers to rethink the epistemological assumptions grounding their work. It reviews the strengths and weaknesses of four salient epistemological orientations in the field – positivism, relativism, interpretivism, and intersubjectivism – to identify the characteristics of a theoretically-informed epistemology for social science. Relying on such an epistemology means seeking a deeper understanding of the social world without losing sight of the constructed nature of one’s conceptual frames. It involves adopting a reflexive position with regard to the norms and traditions in one’s area of specialization and in the field as a whole. Epistemologically-balanced social research is neither the dispassionate gathering of factual information, nor the elaboration of universal assessments formed on the basis of armchair speculation. It involves engaging in inquiry in an independent manner and being aware of the perspectival character of the claims being made in the attempt to shed new light on social phenomena. The caliber of social science can be elevated when researchers recognize the symbolic nature of their work and the significance of their conclusions in the larger social order.
