According to Jürgen Habermas, the " substantive unity " of reason has dissolved in modern times, such that it can no longer answer the question " How should I live?

Argumentation ethics builds on the concept of Discourse ethics developed by Jürgen Habermas ( Hoppe's PhD advisor ) and Karl-Otto Apel, further on misesian praxeology and the deontological ethics of economist Murray Rothbard.

" Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel further transformed the concept of Verstehen, reformulating it on the basis of a transcendental-pragmatic philosophy of language and the theory of communicative action.

Habermas further accommodates his critics on the role of law by making a distinction between ethics and morality.

It is currently associated with the works of Ágnes Heller and Carlos Escudé, and is strongly rooted in the criticisms which Habermas has leveled at postmodern philosophy, namely that universalism and critical thinking are the two essential elements of human rights and that human rights create a superiority of some cultures over others.

To use an epistemological distinction introduced by Jürgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse ( Knowledge and Human Interests ), critical theory in literary studies is ultimately a form of hermeneutics, i. e. knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions — including the interpretation of texts which are themselves implicitly or explicitly the interpretation of other texts.

As such, critical theory was left, in Jürgen Habermas ’ words, without " anything in reserve to which it might appeal ; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope.

In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests, by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation.

When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas redefined critical social theory as a theory of communication, i. e. communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap or intertwine to a much greater degree than before.

However, recent work by philosopher and critical theorist Nikolas Kompridis tries to show that Heidegger's insights into world disclosure are badly misunderstood and mishandled by Habermas, and are of vital importance for critical theory, offering an important way of renewing that tradition.

Habermas also criticized Marxism and previous members of the Frankfurt School for missing the hermeneutical dimension of critical theory.

For Habermas, hermeneutics is one dimension of critical social theory.

Habermas is critical of pure instrumental rationality, arguing that the " Social Life – World " is better suited to literary expression, the former being " intersubjectively accessible experiences " that can be generalized in a formal language, while the latter " must generate an intersubjectivity of mutual understanding in each concrete case ":

Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jürgen Habermas ' work on communicative reason, linguistic intersubjectivity and what Habermas calls " the philosophical discourse of modernity ".

More recently, critical theorists such as Nikolas Kompridis have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he has undermined the aspirations for social change which originally gave purpose to critical theory's various projects — for example the problem of what reason should mean, the analysis and enlargement of " conditions of possibility " for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism.

Although he was initially part of the School's inner circle, Jürgen Habermas is generally considered as the first to have diverged from Horkheimer's research program, thus giving rise to a new generation of critical theorists.

In so doing, experimental psychologists paint an inaccurate portrait of human nature while lending tacit support to the prevailing social order, according to critical theorists like Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas ( in their essays in The Positivist Debate in German Sociology ).

Marx's work inspired the ' Frankfurt School ' of critical theory, now best exemplified in the work of Jürgen Habermas.

Because Habermas developed it in order to have a normative and philosophical foundation for his critical social theory, most of the inroads into formal pragmatics start from sociology, specifically with what is called action theory.

Theatres of conversation and exchange – such as the salons, and the coffeehouses in England – played a critical role in the emergence of what Habermas termed the ‘ public sphere ’, which emerged in ‘ cultural-political contrast ’ to court society.

Weber's thought regarding the rationalizing and secularizing tendencies of modern Western society ( sometimes described as the " Weber Thesis ") would blend with Marxism to facilitate critical theory, particularly in the work of thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas.

Jürgen Habermas established communicative action as a reaction to postmodern challenges to the discourse of modernity, informed both by critical theory and American pragmatism.

The result of the theory is a conception of reason that Habermas sees as doing justice to the most important trends in twentieth century philosophy, while escaping the relativism which characterizes postmodernism, and also providing necessary standards for critical evaluation.

Critical theory was established as a school of thought by five Frankfurt School theoreticians: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his theory ; thought which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.

Among the current advocates of consensus theory as a useful accounting of the concept of " truth " is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas incorporated the notion of the lifeworld and emphasized the importance of both interaction and communication as well as labor and production for social theory.

In addition to linguistic theory, the approach draws from social theory — and contributions from Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu — in order to examine ideologies and power relations involved in discourse.

Fraser worked from Habermas ' basic theory because she saw it to be " an indispensable resource " but questioned the actual structure and attempted to address her concerns.

A viable, more sophisticated consensus theory of truth, a mixture of Peircean theory with speech-act theory and social theory, is that presented and defended by Jürgen Habermas, which sets out the universal pragmatic conditions of ideal consensus and responds to many objections to earlier versions of a pragmatic, consensus theory of truth.

Recent Peirceans Cheryl Misak and Robert B. Talisse have attempted to formulate Peirce's theory of truth in a way that improves on Habermas and provides an epistemological conception of deliberative democracy.

Though unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkeimer's thought presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.

He had spoken at the Frankfurt Römerberggespräche, and was on his way to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, on invitation from second-generation Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas.

Though Marcuse quickly distanced himself from Heidegger following Heidegger's endorsement of Nazism, it has been suggested by thinkers such as Juergen Habermas that an understanding of Marcuse's later thinking demands an appreciation of his early Heideggerian influence.

Jürgen Habermas, spoke of a public sphere that was distinct from both the economic and political sphere.

Habermas argued that the public sphere was bourgeois, egalitarian, rational, and independent from the state, making it the ideal venue for intellectuals to critically examine contemporary politics and society, away from the interference of established authority.

* " 9 / 11 and Global Terrorism: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida ," excerpt from Philosophy in a Time of Terror – Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori

This last field he expanded in a separate volume, where he adopted a constructivist approach that attempted to derive his fundamental ethical principles from the presuppositions of moral discourse, in a manner that put him, as he said, " between Rawls and Habermas ".

Among these schools are the tradition of practical reason extending from Aristotle through Kant to Habermas, which asserts that they can, and the tradition of emotivism, which maintains that they are merely expressions of emotions and have no rational content.

Jäckel charged that Fest was guilty of diverting attention away from the issues by attacking Habermas's motives in criticizing Nolte, and not with concerning himself with what Habermas had to say Jäckel maintained that the Holocaust was indeed a " singular " historical event and criticized Fest for claiming otherwise Mommsen accused Fest of subordinating history to his right-wing politics in his defence of Nolte Mommsen went on to accuse Fest of simply ignoring the real issues such as the " psychological and institutional mechanisms " that explain why the German people accepted the Holocaust by accepting Nolte's claim of a " causal nexus " between Communism and fascism.

In French salons, as Habermas says, " opinion became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence ".

As Habermas argues, in due course, this sphere of rational and universalistic politics, free from both the economy and the State, was destroyed by the same forces that initially established it.

Based on a conference on the occasion of the English translation, at which Habermas himself attended, Craig Calhoun ( 1992 ) edited Habermas and the Public Sphere – a thorough dissection of Habermas ’ bourgeois public sphere by scholars from various academic disciplines.

* " Ein Schiff " (" A Ship ") in: Jürgen Habermas ( Editor ) Stichworte zur " Geistigen Situation der Zeit " ( References on " The spiritual situation of the time ", Volume 1000 from the publisher Suhrkamp ( 1979 )

* Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg ( from 1970 until 1981 ( closed )) directed by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Jürgen Habermas

They are: The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School ; Morality, Culture, and History ; Public Goods, Private Goods ; History and Illusion in Politics ; Glueck und Politik ; Outside Ethics, Philosophy and Real Politics, and Politics and the Imagination, which has just appeared from Princeton University Press.