[http://pavu.com/elliott-frankfurter/philosophy] - Frankfurter Philosophy i-Booster

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frankfurter : -------=Habermas///// Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) As a second-generation member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Habermas was a student of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In his wide-ranging and varied works (many listed below), he had broken with the anti-rationalist, anti-Westernist stance of the previous generation of Frankfurt theorists and taken a different route in his critical appraisal of Western institutions and rationality. Habermas stresses the humanist side of Marx's work as a critic, and has written on the Hegelian tensions between theory and practice in philosophy. Habermas is particularly notable for his defense of a Kantian conception of rationality, which have been assailed by other postmodern thinkers. Habermas combines a deep grounding in the philosophical tradition with a remarkable openness to a wide variety of contemporary philosophical and social theories. Entire books could be written about the respective influences of Kant and !
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Hegel, Marx and Weber, Parsons and Piaget, and so on. The most important source is, however, without question the broad Marxist tradition which also inspired the original Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.--(from Outhwaite, below) Habermas works equally comfortably in the fields of sociology and philosophy, and his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (in two volumes) addresses not only philosophies of agency and rationality, but the theories of sociologists like Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons. In this work, Habermas counterposes the traditional idea of an objective cognitive-instrumental (functionalist) reason to other reasoning capacities that perform subjective and intersubjective duties within the rich fabric of societal interactions. From the ideas of intersubjectivity developed here, Habermas and fellow Frankfurt critic Karl-Otto Apel developed the distinctive theory of discourse ethics. One of Habermas' earliest impor!
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tant philosophical exchanges was with Hans-Georg Gadamer over the applicability of Gadamer's idea of interpretation to the critique of ideology, one of Habermas' prime foci. Because of the varied applicability of Habermas's work, from psychoanalysis to action theory to epistemology to hermeneutics, he is rightly called one of the four or five most important philosophers of the twentieth century and akin to Marx in the variety of interpretations that his ideas have spawned in many fields, including literary theory, economics, and public policy. Here's a quick bibliography of books only by Habermas. (Click on a title for more information or to order from Amazon.com): Knowledge and Human Interests, 1971 Toward a Rational Society, 1971 Theory and Practice, 1973 Legimation Crisis, 1975 Communication and the Evolution of Society, 1979 Philosophical-Political Profiles, 1983 The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, 1984 The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, 1987 On the Logic !
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of the Social Sciences, 1988 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1989 The New Conservatism, 1989 Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 1990 Postmetaphysical Thinking, 1992 Justification and Application, 1993 The Past as Future, 1994 Between Facts and Norms, 1997 All are dated as of publication in English; many of these titles are available from MIT Press or Beacon Press. For those unfamiliar with Habermas, a suggestion would be to begin an investigation of him with either Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Knowledge and Human Interests, or The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. 
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