Eduardo Mendieta

Discourse ethics is one of the most contemporary and controversial theories of ethics. It is contemporaneous because it attempts to formulate a theory of ethics that takes into account all of the major advances in philosophical thinking and their challenges to the foundations of any future ethical theory It is controversial because of its elaboration of the ethical as the injunction to see everything from the standpoint of the generalized Other which simultaneously factors in the social conditions that enable moral subjects to orient themselves toward moral maxims . Discourse ethics may be understood as a synthesis of Hegel and Kant, vis-a-vis the mediation of pragmatism, more precisely via Peirce , and Mead . This dissertation is a reconstruction of the philosophical origins of discourse ethics, which in turn are investigated through a reconstruction of the path of development of its original formulator: Karl-Otto Apel. His Denkweq is characterized as a shift from Hermeneutics to Semiotics, indicating a transition in philosophical traditions from German hermeneutics and ontology to North American pragmatism. The work shows the extent to which Peirce, Royce, and Mead influenced Apel's understanding of ethics, leading him to formulate as early as 1967, the fundamental insights which have characterized discourse ethics. The dissertation begins with a discussion of Apel's doctoral dissertation, Dasein und Erkennen. This chapters shows how in this work Apel elaborated a philosophical-anthropological reading of Heidegger's existential hermeneutics with the intent of developing a theory of knowledge. Chapter two deals with Apel's Habilitation: Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. It shows how this work marked Apel's turn to the study of language as the point of departure for all future philosophizing. Here Apel's four major traditions that determined today's philosophy of language are reconstructed and analyzed. The third chapter deals with Apel's magnus opus, Transformation der Philosophie. This work is analyzed from the standpoint of how it contributes to a linguistic turn of German philosophy, and how it inaugurates both "transcendental semiotics" and "discourse ethics." The fourth chapter is a comparative analysis between Apel's transcendental semiotics and Jurgen Habermas's "universal pragmatics." The last chapter deals with discourse ethics and its contemporary contenders: postmodern ethics and liberation ethics . This chapter answers the question whether discourse ethics is the appropriate answer to a postcolonial and postmodern world; that is, one that has superseded its eurocentrism and false universalism.

Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics, evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others, but most importantly, the development of a philosophy written from the underside of Eurocentric modernist teleologies, an ethics of the impoverished, and the articulation of a unique Latin American theoretical perspective. This anthology of original articles by U.S. philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought, offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives, including feminist ones. Also included is an essay by Dussel that responds to these essays.

Arthur Schopenhauer, in an essay titled “On Authorship and Style,” included in volume 2 of his Parerga and Paralipomena, writes, “First there are two kinds of authors, those who write for the sake of the subject and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have ideas or experiences which seem to them worth communicating; the latter need money and thus write for money.”1 Schopenhauer, however, changes his mind quickly a page later and writes: “Again, we can say that there are three kinds of authors; first those who write without thinking. They write from memory, from reminiscences, or even directly from the books of others. This class is the most numerous. Secondly, those who think while they are ..

Jorge Valadez’s important contribution to political theory in general, and multicultural citizenship in particular, is assessed from the standpoint of the duplicitous role ‘culture’ plays in contemporary political theory. After underscoring its virtues, the essay turns to a discussion of three major concerns that the book raises: its negativistic view of the culture of the oppressed; its anachronistic proposal about universal property rights; and the way the author might have to revise its view of the ethnogroups in order to deal appropriately with Latinos in the USA.

In "The Frankfurt School on Religion," Eduardo Mendieta has brought together a collection of readings and essays revealing both the deep connections that the Frankfurt School has always maintained with religion as well as the significant contribution that its work has to offer. Rather than being unanimously antagonistic towards religion as has been the received wisdom, this collection shows the great diversity of responses that individual thinkers of the school developed and the seriousness and sophistication with which they engaged the core religious issues and major religious traditions. Through a careful selection of writings from eleven prominent theorists, including several new and previously untranslated pieces from Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, this volume provides much needed sources for religious leaders, philosophers, and social theorists as they grapple with the nature and functions of religion in the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape. "The Frankfurt School on Religion" recovers the religious dimensions of the Frankfurt School, for too long sidelined or ignored, and offers new perspectives and insights necessary to the development of a fuller and more nuanced critical theory of society. Selections and essays from: Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jurgen Habermas, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens

Philosophy projects a certain understanding of reason that is related to the ways in which the city figures in its imaginary. Conversely, the city is a practice of spatialization that determines the ways in which agents are able, or unable, to live out their social agency. This essay focuses on the ways in which philosophy and the city's spatializing practices and imaginaries inform differential ways of living out social agency. The thrust of the investigation is to discern the ways in which sexism - differential engendering - results from the relationship that exists between philosophy and the city. To illustrate this link between philosophy, the city, and differential engendering, the work turns to a consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology, which is taken as an exemplary illustration of the entwinement between the philosophical imaginary, and the perception and reception of the city

Zur Anwendung der Diskursethik in Politik, Recht und Wissenschaft suggests that something like a critique of practical reason, or at least its foundations—from the perspective of transcendental semiotics—is in the works, and in addition that it is something possible, desirable and even necessary. The suggestion is that a semiotically transformed transcendental philosophy, as the theoretical aspect of a philosophical system, has its complement in a practical philosophy whose main tenets have come to be known as discourse ethics, or the discourse theory of ethics. Historically, Karl-Otto Apel was the first to formulate some of the main arguments of a communicative, discursive, semiotical, or pragmatic theory of morality, and he did so as far back as the late sixties and early seventies. In the United States, in contrast to European and Latin American countries where Apel's work is better known, Habermas' name is the one most frequently associated with the discourse theory of ethics. This state of affairs may be due to a dearth of translations of primary sources, though Benhabib's and Dallmayr's The Communicative Ethics Controversy provides an excellent selection of primary texts. Consequently, today in the United States we stand not only quite behind the times in terms of the primary sources of discourse ethics, but also of the growing secondary literature on the subject. Neither Apel, nor Habermas, can be said to provide the only discourse-ethical approach within philosophy and political theory, exhaust the consequences and possibilities of an application of discourse ethics by their respective attempts to link it directly to either a theory of politics, or a theory of the democratic state that is circumscribed by both a specifically German historical horizon and a European-First World outlook. Indeed what makes this book particularly interesting, helpful, and above all timely is that it makes a conscious effort to represent the various positions that fall under the rubric of communicative, or discourse oriented practical philosophy, and the many ways in which problems of practical philosophy can be approached—while it attempts to give us a distinct sense that this approach has in fact graduated to an international status, that is, that it is no longer, if it ever was, exclusively an affair of German philosophy.

: María Pía Lara's two books, La Democracia como proyecto de identidad ética and Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere are described and analyzed. Her contribution to a feminist left-Habermasian theory of the relationship between the aesthetic dimension and the political imaginary are discussed. Questions and concerns, however, are raised regarding the assumptions of universal pragmatics and Lara's attempt to offer a positive reading of the dependence of the political imaginary on literary acts and genres.

This important new volume brings together Habermas' key writing on religion and religious belief. Habermas explores the relations between Christian and Jewish thought, on the one hand, and the Western philosophical tradition on the other. In so doing, he examines a range of important figures, including Benjamin, Heidegger, Johann Baptist Metz and Gershom Scholem. In a new introduction written especially for this volume, Eduardo Mendieta places Habermas' engagement with religion in the context of his work as a whole. Mendieta also discusses Habermas' writings in relation to Jewish Messianism and the Frankfurt School, showing how the essays in Religion and Rationality, one of which is translated into English for the first time, foreground an important, yet often neglected, dimension of critical theory. The volume concludes with an original extended interview, also in English for the first time, in which Habermas develops his current views on religion in modern society. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theology, religious studies and philosophy, as well as to all those already familiar with Habermas' work.