Friday, May 13, 2011

a Habermasian sense of cultural evolution



I feel that David Ingram’s synoptic review of Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts, ed. by Barbara Fultner, is the best brief introduction to Habermas’s Project that I’ve ever read, at least because he’s reviewing an outstanding collection of essays.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

well-being and public policy: lifeworld and system


April 19 — 7:30 pm

Thinking about the relationship of well-being and public policy has become very important in a lot of venues, I believe. One might hope that if social philosophy has any usefulness, it contributes to progressing the relationship between well-being and public policy. So, thinking about lifeworld and system relative to the real world might be well exemplified by applying that to a real context. Outgrowing contexts of decades past doesn’t change the importance of conceptual issues for real issues of the present, if the conceptual resources are really important.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

looking back: Habermas and “lifeworld”



A practical way to get to the heart of the matter with Jürgen Habermas (hereafter: JH) is the short number of philosophical pages on lifeworld in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (PDM): pp. 341-346; 359-366. There, he draws directly from Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2 (TCA-2) to provide a synoptic of how he understands lifeworld, as a matter of rationalization for the sake of theorizing public communicative action. Lifeworld itself is a “resource” for his interest in political action. But through this PDM discussion, he’s also evocative about understanding the lifeworld itself. PDM is a good context (4+ years after TCA) to get at his philosophical interest. 


Wednesday, April 13, 2011

about lifeworldliness



I wrote quickly in a recent posting that “there’s no prima facie incommensurability between regarding integrated symbolic life and economic activity,” but I failed to express my point well, which had in mind a surmise about regarding symbolic life and economic activity as integrated.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

anticipating a discursive consilience



Eduardo Mendieta’s Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews article Friday on David Ingram’s Habermas: Introduction and Analysis notes in passing that
Since 2008, Habermas has been working on a large manuscript on “Faith and Reason” in which he is rethinking Western sociological theory in light of the failure of religion to wither away....In this manuscript Habermas is also revising his theory of the origins of language, taking up the work of paleontologists, anthropologists, and cognitive and brain development theorists. In addition, he is revisiting his phenomenological theory of the life-world and the emergence of world-views from the secularization of religious doctrines.
A philosopher after my own heart.