Critical Theory (Great Debates in Philosophy) - Tapa dura

Philosophical controversies within contemporary critical theory arise largely from questions about the nature, scope and limits of human reason. As the linguistic turn in 20th-century philosophy has increasingly given way to a socio-critical turn, traditional ideas of "pure" reason have been left further behind. But there is considerable disagreement about what that shift entails for enlightenment ideals of self-consciousness, self-determination and self-realization. In this book, two philosophers bring those disagreements into focus around a set of familiar philosophical issues concerning reason and the rational subject, truth and representation, knowledge and objectivity, identity and difference, relativism and universalism, the right and the good. But these "perennial problems" are resituated within the context of critical theory as it has developed from the work of the Frankfurt Schools in the 1930s and 1940s, taking in the multiplicity of contemporary approaches: genealogical, hermeneutic, neopragmatist, deconstructive and reconstructive. In Part One, Thomas McCarthy develops an approach to critical social theory that builds on the thoughts of Jurgen Habermas in formulating a less transcendental, more pragmatic, but nevertheless universalist conception of communicative reason. In Part Two, David Hoy defends a conception of genealogical hermeneutics that builds on the thought of Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer in developing an anti-foundationalist, historicist approach that avoids relativism and nihilism. The two essays close with contrasting discussions of universalism and pluralism. In Part Three, each author replies to the arguments of the other.