Jurgen habermas brief biography of benjamin
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Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, ) is a Germanphilosopher, political scientist, and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory, best known for his concept of the "public sphere." His numerous and complex writings span many aspects of social theory, and constitute his effort to advance the Enlightenment project to develop human society based on our rational faculty, and thus free people from irrational superstition and intolerance. He has warned that society faces a crisis, as our "life-world," in which our shared values and practices are developed and constantly reaffirmed through communicative action, has increasingly been dominated by administrative and economic systems that preclude the chance for such communication. Nevertheless, Habermas has remained optimistic that the "public sphere" can be redeveloped, and human society can advance to a better state, founded on common under
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Jürgen Habermas
1. Biography
Biographical Introduction
Habermas was born in June and brought up in provincial North-Rhine Westphalia, to conservative, educated middle-class parents, who had been neither critical nor strongly supportive of the Nazi regime. In he was called up to man the defences on the western front. A little over a year later he was shaken to his core by what he learnt of the Nazi atrocities from the Nuremberg Trials, and news coverage of the Holocaust. Thus, although still in his teens, he experienced as a turning point that would shape his political and cultural outlook. As he put it frankly in an interview in
I am myself a product of “reeducation” … bygd this I mean that … we learnt that the bourgeois constitutional state in its French, or American, or English form eller gestalt is an historical achievement. (a: interview 3, 79)
Two moments exemplify Habermas’s complex position in-between the generations of and In , when Habermas
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Jürgen Habermas
First published Thu May 17,
Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engagerad in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of tro, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. Moreover, he has figured prominently in Germany as a public intellectual, commenting on controversial issues of the day in German newspapers such as Die Zeit.
However, if one looks back over his corpus of work, one can discern two broad lines of enduring interest, one having to do with the political domain