David Rasmussen

In this essay I deal with two conceptions of the political—one that entails a clash of civilizations associated with an Schmittian critique of liberalism, and a second that envisions the political as an emerging domain in relationship to the idea of overlapping consensus. The discovery of the emerging domain of the political in the later work of John Rawls separates the comprehensive from the political in a way that breaks the link between modernization and secularization. In so doing Rawls accommodates the rise of religion that has become a major issue in the twenty-first century. I follow Rawls's development from…

This book provides a perceptive analysis of the "narrative turn" that led Paul Ricoeur to his magisterial work Time and Narrative. Ricoeur has for many years explored the intersections of diverse strands of European philosophy, but it is his recent work that has attracted the most discussion and engendered the most debate in Europe and America. The Narrative Path explores the roots and meaning of that work. Two of the book's five essays reach back to Ricoeur's earlier work to clarify his themes: Richard Kearney concentrates on the role of imagination in hermeneuties, and Maria Villela Petit explores the development of Ricoeur's concept of history from History and Truth to Time and Narrative. Two essays analyze the significance of Ricoeur's reflections on metaphoric and narrative language: Serge Mellinger looks at the relationship between time and poetry from the point of view of Ricoeur's discussions of the connection between time and narrative, and T. Peter Kemp extends Ricoeur's analysis to argue that narration is indispensable to ethics. The book concludes with a reflection by Ricoeur himself on the linguistic, practical, and ethical dimensions of human beings, and with a bibliography of Ricoeur's work in English. T. Peter Kemp teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. The Narrative Pathis based on a special issue of the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism, edited by David Rasmussen, who is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College.

This is the first systematic assessment of the work of J[um] rgen Habermas - the key theorist of the later Frankfurt School, whose writing has had a major impact on social theory and sociology. These four volumes comprise the key secondary literature on Habermas. Edited by David Rasmussen and James Swindal, leading commentators on Habermas's work, this will be the standard reference work on one of the canonical theorists of the 20th century. VOLUME ONE: The Foundations of Habermas's Project VOLUME TWO: Law and Politics VOLUME THREE: Ethics VOLUME FOUR: Communicative Rationality, Formal Pragmatics, Speech Act Theory and Truth

The paper argues that Paul Ricoeur's The Philosophy of the Will retained a certain fidelity to phenomenology's early emphasis on subjectivity. When Ricoeur turned to the philosophy of language, he found a way to retain a certain emphasis on subjectivity and individuality that would make his work distinctive among other approaches to the philosophy of language. Hence, the title, Preserving the Eidetic Moment, intends to characterize Ricoeur's distinctive contribution to philosophy. The paper goes on to show how Ricoeur's approach can contribute to Critical Theory, particularly in relationship to its theory of interlocution

The thesis put forward by Luc Ferry in this book is the following: "If Heidegger's deconstruction of metaphysics and Strauss's critique of historicism are incontrovertible, and if, despite everything, we refuse to conclude that a 'return to the ancients' is in order... we must take up the challenge of showing how modernity may criticize itself and thus refrain from yielding to the wiles of metaphysics". It is a substantial thesis--not entirely original, but well-argued, with an interesting exegesis of Fichte's theory of rights.