June 19, 2008

I easily and commonly regard my Habermasian pages as developmental—as if someone else had written them. This is good for critical humility in a commitment to lifelong learning.


But some developmental Habermasian work seems to remain valid. As I intend to frame all the Habermasian years as a singular project, I currently think that I have a durable short introduction to Habermas’ work:

June 2007
reason for democracy
a brief on grounding democracy in our form of life

That’s the discussion used with the introduction to Habermas for persons coming across the Yahoo! group.

October 2007
Habermas and “political world society”
a sympathetic critique of Habermas' recent sense of global society


February 2008

Some recent Habermasian work worth noting, 2002–2004, 2006–2008. (I'll eventually update the listing, including 2005 and 2009 to present.


February 2008

I had a rather high-minded hope for the Yahoo! group, expressed by my non-moderating moderator role—which, by the way, ends by linking to 7 years of Habermas discussions prior to the Yahoo! group—but I deleted that moderator page from the group Webpage some time ago.

I began Habermasian posting over a decade ago, in an ongoing project that has made much developmental use of the discussion medium and focused that into the neo-Habermasian evolving project that will get fleshed out, after a period of specific conceptual adventuring with some recent philosophical and scientific work of others. (You’ll see that the latter part of the “evolving project” page becomes sympathetically critical of Habermas’ recent views on current events, relative to Europe and “the market of ideas.”

I seek to do something quite post-Habermasian—not anti-Habermasian, but taking Habermas’ 20thC motivation and insightfulness as preliminary for going forward in 21stC philosophy.

For example, the interdisciplinarity of The Theory of Communicative Action necessarily dwells with available work of its time, but its example is exemplary for doing social theory now in view of work unavailable to any philosophical theorist at that time, with respect to evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science, moral psychology, epistemology, geopolitical realities, and interdomainal discursive modeling that was impossible at the beginning of the 1980s. Meanwhile, Habermas’ development has remained attuned to his time and new resources, as Between Facts and Norms couldn’t have been written in the early 1980s (and he would not write a comprehensive theory of communicative action today essentially like the discursive round he did in 1981).



Learning never ends, which includes writing that merely expresses ongoing development. That includes the large share of my longer postings to the Yahoo! Habermas group, which has stimulated lots of provisional stances (in an uneditable medium) that will figure into future discusssions linked here.

Also, participation in the Yahoo! group has stimulated some ad hoc Web page discussions that I would prefer to rethink, haven’t yet, but which might be interesting for others:



March 2006
Habermas, psychoanalysis, and existence


April 2006
Habermas and Heidegger
A personal note


May 2003
Thinking through Habermas' criticism of the overthrow of Hussein
This intensive dwelling with Habermas’ article, “What does the felling of the monument mean?,” was an experimental approach to the article that I abandoned. IBut I’ve removed it, pending reworking someday. (note to myself: It's at: [L530...]HS]ProjDev].)


February 2008 (again)

As my engagements journey away from its Habermasian motivations, those pages will develop apart from especially Habermasian interests. But especially-Habermasian interests will remain, so those aspects of the evolving project will generate especially Habermasian pages linked here; and new especially-Habermasian pages will be linked here.

This page will evolve. Habermasian studies deserve to thrive. But my own development has been routing away from that for quite some time.