The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
Project no. 938 · Status: Kapanmış · 2015
Summary
The leading representative of second generation of the Frankfurt School theorists, German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas is one of the most frequently referenced thinker in contemporary discussions which are gathered especially under the heading of “modernity-postmodernity debate” since 1980s. His book titled Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity) which was first published in 1985 has become an important resource for perceiving the formation of the philosophical discourse of modernity and thereby understanding the debate on modernity as a whole. The main objective of this paper is to display the Habermas’s reading of modernity within the framework of Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and thereby revealing basic concepts and tensions which can shed a light on the contemporary discussions shaped by radical critique of modernity and reason. To this end, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity’s main theses will be displayed and discussed. Thus some aspects of Habermas’s work’s, which continues to inform the endeavors aspiring to develop a critical approach to the major social and political problems of today will be highlighted. Finally, Habermas’s suggestions and views about modernity’s project will be evaluated with the contemporary criticics against his perspective. For this end, we’ll discuss the place of Kant's philosophy in Habermas’s reading of modernity. In the text “Kant?s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the benefit of Two Hundred years Hindsight”, Habermas argues that Kant’s idea of cosmpolitan order which leads us to perpetual peace, needs to be subject to a conceptual revision and to be reformulated in order to maintain its relation to the present situation of the world which has undergone a fundamental ongoing change. But Habermas's conceptual revision or his alternative alternative framework proposal does not exist in this text. As a matter of fact, the aim of the second part of our project is to find out and critically display that what kind of democratic constitutional political structure that Habermas offered in his work as an assurance of peace ("peaceful nature of the republics") and his views on the relationship between a peaceful democracy and capitalism ("the power of world trade creating partnership bonds"), and his proposal of a publicity which can be a place of debate underpinning political criticism and political learning processes in spite of the structural transformation of the publicity ("The function of the political public sphere").