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.

" Thus, she concludes: " In most cases it would more appropriate to unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them – a point that accords with the spirit of Habermas ’ later communicative ethics ".

Hildebrand is pleased that Nolte denies the singularity of the Nazi atrocities ” Hans Mommsen defended Habermas against Hildebrand by writing :“ Hildebrand ’ s partisan shots can be easily deflected ; that Habermas is accused of a “ loss of reality and Manichaeanism ”, and that his honesty is denied is witness to the self-consciousness of a self-nominated historian elite, which has set itself the task of tracing the outlines of the seeming badly needed image of history ” Writing of Hildebrand's support for Nolte, Mommsen declared that: “ Hildebrand ’ s polemic clearly suggests that he barely considered the consequences of making Nolte ’ s constructs the centrepiece of a modern German conservatism that is very anxious to relativize the National Socialist experience and to find the way back to a putative historically “ normal situation ” In another essay, Mommsen wrote that Hildebrand was gulity of hypocrisy because Hildebrand had until 1986 always claimed that generic fascism was invalid concept because of the " singularity " of the Holocaust Mommsen wrote that " Klaus Hildebrand explicitly took sides with Nolte's view when he gave his previously stubbornly claimed singularity of National Socialism ( failing to appreciate that was, as is well known, the standard criticism of the comparative fascism theory )" Martin Broszat observed that when Hildebrand organized a conference of right-wing German historians under the auspices of the Schleyer Foundation in West Berlin in September 1986, he did not invite Nolte, whom Broszat observed lived in Berlin.

Concerning ( 2 ), Habermas clearly and explicitly understands communicative rationality according to the terms of a reconstructive science.

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.

Jürgen Habermas believed that the base-superstructure framework, used by many Marxist theorists to describe the relation between the state and the economy, was overly simplistic.

" According to the distinguished German social theorist, Jürgen Habermas, " For Weber, the intrinsic ( that is, not merely contingent ) relationship between modernity and what he called ' Occidental rationalism ' was still self-evident.

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 ".

In response to the claim made by Jürgen Habermas against Ernst Nolte that there was no comparison between the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge genocide because Cambodia was a backward, Third World agrarian state and Germany a modern, First World industrial state, Fest called Habermas a racist for suggesting that it was natural for Cambodians to engage in genocide while unnatural for Germans.

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.

Benhabib notes that in Habermas ' idea of the public sphere, the distinction between public and private issues separates issues that normally affect women ( issues of " reproduction, nurture and care for the young, the sick, and the elderly ") into the private realm and out of the discussion in the public sphere.

For Habermas, the most significant difference between a sentence and an utterance is in that sentences are judged according to how well they make sense grammatically, while utterances are judged according to their communicative validity ( see section 1 ).

Habermas suggests along these lines that " we can distinguish between know-how, the ability of a competent subject who understands how to produce or accomplish something, and know-that, the explicit knowledge of how it is that he is able to do so " ( 1998a ).

Furthermore, following this distinction between surface and deep structures, Habermas views the task of the reconstructive sciences as moving in two directions, horizontal and vertical.

These theorists approximated the ideal division of labor between philosophy and science that Habermas understands as crucial for progress to be achieved across disciplines ; the human sciences in particular represent fertile ground for such cooperation.

Lockwood's conceptual distinction influenced Jürgen Habermas ' discussion in the classic Legitimation Crises, who made the now famous distinction between system integration and social integration of the lifeworld.

1964 On the Soziologentag ( conference on sociology ) in Heidelberg the debate grew up into an excited discussion between Habermas and Albert.

Jürgen Habermas argues, in his On the Logic of the Social Sciences ( 1967 ), that " the positivist thesis of unified science, which assimilates all the sciences to a natural-scientific model, fails because of the intimate relationship between the social sciences and history, and the fact that they are based on a situation-specific understanding of meaning that can be explicated only hermeneutically ... access to a symbolically prestructured reality cannot be gained by observation alone.

Jürgen Habermas argues, in his On the Logic of the Social Sciences ( 1967 ), that " the positivist thesis of unified science, which assimilates all the sciences to a natural-scientific model, fails because of the intimate relationship between the social sciences and history, and the fact that they are based on a situation-specific understanding of meaning that can be explicated only hermeneutically ... access to a symbolically prestructured reality cannot be gained by observation alone.

Hildebrand defended Hillgruber by attacking Habermas over the “ tried and true higher-ups of the NSDAP ” line created by Habermas, which Hildebrand considered a highly dishonest method of attack Hildebrand argued that Hillgruber was merely trying to show the " tragedy " of the Eastern Front, and was not engaging in moral equivalence between the German and Soviet sides In another essay entitled " He Who Wants to Escape the Abyss " first published in Die Welt on November 22, 1986, Hildebrand accused Habermas of engaging in “ scandalous ” attacks on Hillgruber Hildebrand claimed that “ Habermas ’ s criticism is based in no small part on quotations that unambiguously falsify the matter ” Hildebrand wrote that in his view about Habermas that: “ A citation garbled like this is no way a forgivable exception.

Jürgen Habermas has argued that to understand rationalization properly requires going beyond Weber's notion of rationalization and distinguishing between instrumental rationality, which involves calculation and efficiency ( in other words, reducing all relationships to those of means and ends ), and communicative rationality, which involves expanding the scope of mutual understanding in communication, the ability to expand this understanding through reflective discourse about communication, and making social and political life subject to this expanded understanding.

An ethics of communication along the lines suggested by Jürgen Habermas suffers, according to Vattimo, from finding itself in a substantially ahistorical position, while oscillating between formalism and cultural relativism ( 1992: 117 ).

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

The key point is that the presuppositions of argumentation and communication that have been rationally reconstructed by Habermas are both factual and normative.

In his vision of a solution to this " vertigo ," Lyotard opposes the assumptions of universality, consensus, and generality that he identified within the thought of Humanistic, Neo-Kantian philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and proposes a continuation of experimentation and diversity to be assessed pragmatically in the context of language games rather than via appeal to a resurrected series of transcendentals and metaphysical unities.

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

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.

In order for anyone to speak validly — and therefore, to have his or her comments vindicated, and therefore reach a genuine consensus and understanding — Habermas notes that a few more fundamental commitments are required.

In similar fashion, Habermas wrote of ' the massive background of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld ... lifeworld contexts that provided the backing of a massive background consensus '.

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.

According to Habermas, the " substantive " ( i. e. formally & semantically integrated ) rationality that characterized pre-modern worldviews has, since modern times, been emptied of its content and divided into three purely " formal " realms: ( 1 ) cognitive-instrumental reason ; ( 2 ) moral-practical reason ; and ( 3 ) aesthetic-expressive reason.

Thus, Habermas can compare and contrast the rationality of various forms of society with an eye to the deeper and more universal processes at work, which enables him to justify the critique of certain forms ( i. e., that Nazism is irrational and bad ) and lend support to the championing of others ( i. e., democracy is rational and good ).

* L. Corchia, Jürgen Habermas.

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.

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.

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.

Habermas dissolved further the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German Idealism, though his thought remains broadly Marxist in its epistemological approach.

Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia, Genova, Edizioni ECIG, 2010, ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1.

* L. Corchia, Jürgen Habermas.

Jürgen Habermas believes historical materialism " needs revision in many respects ", especially because it has ignored the significance of communicative action.

* Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society.

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.

Weber has influenced many later social theorists, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, György Lukács and Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas, Lyotard and Rorty are also philosophers who are influenced by Heidegger ’ s interpretation of Nietzsche.

Out of the Frankfurt School, thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas combined Marxian and Freudian perspectives.