Eduardo Mendieta

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.

i want to begin by thanking my good friend Richard Hart for the invitation to be part of this wonderful panel in which we are honoring while also being challenged by the work of Charles Johnson to think differently about our discipline. I also want to thank the organizers of SAAP for hosting this important series of lectures, in which we are invited to engage the work of thinkers who challenge us to think differently because they either come to our problems from different disciplines and fields, or teach us to see their problems as ours. From the outset, I must admit my trepidation at engaging Johnson’s work, which spans nearly half a century and a variety of genres. Johnson began as a cartoonist, then became a...

But in the age of the disintegration of experience human beings are no longer subjectively disposed to letter writing. For the present it looks as though technology is eliminating the preconditions for the letter. Because letters are no longer necessary, given the speedier possibilities of communication and the shrinking of spatio-temporal distances, their inherent substance is disintegrating as well. Benjamin brought to letter writing an antiquarian and uninhibited talent; for him the letter represented the wedding of something in the process of disappearing and the utopia of restoration.In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family privatized individuals viewed themselves as independent even from the private...