After-metaphysical thought

Author: (German) Habermas Cao Weidong Fu Degen
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2001-05-01
Features: In this book, Habermas takes the "Metaphysics Debate" as a starting point to focus on elucidating his critique and reference to Anglo-American linguistic philosophy, particularly pragmatic semantics, in order to open up a pragmatic path between logic semantics and pragmatics. From the perspective of general pragmatics, it provides strong evidence for the theory of communicative action, thereby dismantling the traditional philosophical premise of rational consciousness and transferring the premise of communicative rationality to the philosophy of language.
Author's Preface: This book collects the philosophical essays I wrote over the past two years, arranged in chronological order. Of course, from this seemingly random arrangement, one can also discern the internal connections between them. The first three essays are responses to the recent trend calling for a return to metaphysical thought. They uphold a rational concept that is skeptical yet not pessimistic. The essays in the second part discuss the pragmatic transformation in linguistic analysis. Their writing style differs from the preceding ones; they clarify the concept of communicative rationality within the context of contemporary meaning theory and behavior theory; there are overlapping points, though they seem redundant, I did not remove them. The seventh essay discusses the same theme as the first three from a more peripheral perspective,. The last two essays draw out two threads from this line of argument and elaborate on them: one is the problem of the unspeakable individual, and the other is why philosophical texts, despite being essentially rhetorical in nature, have not been integrated into the literary category?
Habermas Fragments from Frankfurt/1988: Knowledge and Prejudice Setting aside the barriers between schools, themes such as post-metaphysical thought, the linguistic turn, the positioning of reason, and the overcoming of logos centrism are among the most important driving forces of 20th-century philosophical research. Of course, they have brought not only new insights but also new prejudices. For example, the scientific methodology blueprint, while developing philosophy into a specialized discipline without privileged claims to knowledge, has also fostered scientism (Szientismus), thereby not only elevating the expression of philosophical thought to a more rigorous analytical level but also establishing many astonishing scientific ideals—whether in disciplines like physics and neurophysiology or in methodologies like behaviorism. The linguistic turn further grounded philosophical research on a more reliable methodological foundation and freed it from the of consciousness theory. However, in this process, it also gave rise to an ontological view of language, making language's function of interpreting the world relatively independent of the internal learning process, and sanctified the transformation of the linguistic picture as a poetic primordial event (Ursprungsgeschehen). The skeptical concept of reason led philosophy to awaken fully and simultaneously clarified the role of philosophy as the guardian of reason. However, from another perspective, a radical critique of reason also became prevalent, not only opposing the of intellect into instrumental reason but also equating reason with oppression (Repression), aiming to seek a deterministic or skeptical escape from an other. Clarifying the relationship between theory and practice has ultimately prevented philosophical thought from succumbing to independent fantasies and broadened its horizons by recognizing the validity requirements that extend beyond mere assertion. Yet, this has also led many into a productivity cult, reducing practice to labor and obscuring the multiple relationships between the symbolically constructed lifeworld, communicative action, and discourse. Currently, in an increasingly ambiguous context, many new convergences are becoming increasingly clear. However, the debates around these eternal themes continue as ever, such as discussions on the unity of reason in the plural voices, the status of philosophical thought in the polyphony of science, the debates on the esoteric and exoteric (Esoterik und Exoterik), the debate on specialized science and enlightenment, and ultimately the debate on the boundaries between philosophy and literature. Additionally, the wave of revivals sweeping across the entire Western world over the past decade has brought to the surface a theme that has accompanied modernity from the very beginning—the essentially mimetic nature of metaphysics, once again transformed.