Originism

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Though I have much to say about this theme, the comments below, from 2011, will suffice for a sense of Originism which other discussions of mine can link to, when ‘Originism’ is first mentioned.

JH and difficulties of governing the EU

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part of Habermas and the EU

Only this week has JH’s The Crisis of the European Union become available in the U.S. Polity delightfully divides its publication dates into “U.S.” and “ROW” [Rest of World]. Why the ROW get Polity books before the U.S. is a curious thing. But the U.S. edition reverses the order of essays, apparently. (The book description refers to the human rights essay as first, but it’s not first in the U.S. edition).

The EU situation is changing so quickly that one might wonder about the topicality of JH’s essay on the EU over a year after it was written. Of course, it’s topical for long-term issues of EU governance. But needs for action are in a quickly-changing environment.

a Habermasian sense of cultural evolution

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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.

well-being and public policy: lifeworld and system

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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.

looking back: Habermas and “lifeworld”

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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. 

about lifeworldliness

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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.

pragmatic 3-fold of the lifeworld

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to be discussed:

Click on the image for a larger size.