•  83
    Morality and Critical Theory: On the Normative Problem of Frankfurt School Social Criticism
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2009 (146): 7-41. 2009.
    I. The Problem of Normative Foundations: Habermas's Original Criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer In The Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas writes:From the beginning, critical theory labored over the difficulty of giving an account of its own normative foundations …1Call this Habermas's original objection to the problem of normative foundations. It has been hugely influential both in the interpretation and assessment of Frankfurt School critical theory and in the development of later …Read more
  •  80
    Modernity and morality in Habermas's discourse ethics
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 43 (3). 2000.
    Discourse ethics is originally conceived as a programme of philosophical justification of morality. This depends on the formal derivation of the moral principle (U) from non-moral principles. The moral theory is supposed to fall out of a pragmatic theory of meaning. The original programme plays a central role in Habermas's social theory: the moral theory, if true, provides good evidence for the more general theory of modernization. But neither Habermas nor his followers have succeeded in providi…Read more
  •  75
    Habermas and Rawls are two heavyweights of social and political philosophy, and they are undoubtedly the two most written about authors in this field. However, there has not been much informed and interesting work on the points of intersection between their projects, partly because their work comes from different traditions—roughly the European tradition of social and political theory and the Anglo-American analytic tradition of political philosophy. In this volume, contributors re-examine the H…Read more
  •  64
    Hegel, Adorno and the Origins of Immanent Criticism
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (6): 1142-1166. 2014.
    ‘Immanent criticism' has been discussed by philosophers of quite different persuasions, working in separate areas and in different traditions of philosophy. Almost all of them agree on roughly the same story about its origins: It is that Hegel invented immanent criticism, that Marx later developed it, and that the various members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, refined it in various ways, and that they are all paradigmatic practitioners of immanent criticism. I call this the Contin…Read more
  •  62
    Habermas: a very short introduction
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
    J|rgen Habermas is the most renowned living German philosopher. This book aims to give a clear and readable overview of his philosophical work. It analyzes both the theoretical underpinnings of Habermas's social theory, and its more concrete applications in the fields of ethics, politics, and law. Finally, it examines how Habermas's social and political theory informs his writing on real, current political and social problems. The author explores Habermas's influence on a wide variety of fields-…Read more
  •  55
    Conflict and reconciliation in Hegel's theory of the tragic
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (3): 493-520. 1999.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conflict and Reconciliation in Hegel’s Theory of the TragicJ. G. FinlaysonἊϱης Ἂϱει ξυμβαλεῖ, Δίϰᾳ Διϰα. (Κοεφοϱοι 461)this article has two related aims: to expound and defend Hegel’s theory of the tragic; and to clarify Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. These two aims are related in that a widespread, but misleading, conception of the tragic and a common, but mistaken, understanding of Hegel’s concept of reconciliation can seem to …Read more
  •  55
    Adorno on the ethical and the ineffable
    European Journal of Philosophy 10 (1). 2002.
    The thesis is that Adorno has a normative ethics, albeit a minimal and negative ethics of resistance. However Adorno’s ethical theory faces two problems: the problem of the availability of the good and the problem of whether a normative ethics is consistent with philosophical negativism. The author argues that a correct of understanding the role of the ineffable in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics solves both problems: it provides an account of the availability of the good that is consistent with hi…Read more
  •  40
    The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno
    European Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 392-419. 2012.
    Adorno's saying that ‘art is the promise of happiness’ radiates into every corner of his work from his aesthetic theory to his critical theory of society. However, it is much misunderstood. This can be seen from the standard answer to the question: in virtue of what formal features do art works, according to Adorno, promise happiness? The standard answer to this question suggests that the aesthetic harmony occasioned by the organic wholeness of the form realized in the artwork contrasts with and…Read more
  •  35
    Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between Habermas and Rawls. This is partly because they give undue attention to differences between Rawls’s original position and Habermas’s principle, neither of which is germane to the actual dispute. The dispute is at bottom about how best to conceive of democratic legitimacy. Rawls indicates where the dividing issues lie when he objects that Habermas’s account of democratic legitimacy is comprehensive a…Read more
  •  32
    What are 'universalizable interests'?
    Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (4). 2000.
    Many of Habermas's critical commentators agree that Discourse Ethics fails as a theory of the validity of moral norms and only succeeds as a theory of the democratic legitimacy of socio-political norms. The reason they give is that the moral principle is too restrictive to count as a necessary condition of the validity of norms. Other commentators more sympathetic to his project want to abandon principle and remodel Discourse Ethics without it. Still others want to downplay the role of universal…Read more
  •  27
    No proviso: Habermas on Rawls, religion and public reason
    European Journal of Political Theory 20 (3): 443-464. 2018.
    In this article, I argue that a common view of Habermas’s theory of public reason, which takes it to be similar to Rawls’s ‘proviso’, is mistaken. I explain why that mistake arises, and show that t...
  •  26
    Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable
    European Journal of Philosophy 10 (1): 1-25. 2002.
    The thesis is that Adorno has a normative ethics, albeit a minimal and negative ethics of resistance. However Adorno’s ethical theory faces two problems: the problem of the availability of the good and the problem of whether a normative ethics is consistent with philosophical negativism. The author argues that a correct of understanding the role of the ineffable in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics solves both problems: it provides an account of the availability of the good that is consistent with hi…Read more
  •  25
    The Habermas-Rawls Dispute Redivivus
    Politics and Ethics Review 3 (1): 144-162. 2007.
    This article re-examines the Habermas–Rawls debate. It contends that what is at issue in this dispute has largely been missed. The standard view that principle and the original position form a useful point of comparison between their respective theories and that the dispute between them can be fruitfully understood on this basis is rejected. I show how this view has arisen and why it is wrong. The real issue between them lies in their respective accounts of the justification of political norms,a…Read more
  •  24
    Habermas's Moral Cognitivism and the Frege‐Geach Challenge
    European Journal of Philosophy 13 (3): 319-344. 2005.
    This is a critical discussion of Habermas's conception of moral cognitivism. I explain how it fits in with his meta-ethical anti-realism. I place Habermas's Discourse Ethics in the broad field of analytic meta-ethics. I also look at the question of whether the Frege-Geach problem applies to Habermas's Discourse Ethics, and if so, how he should best reply.
  •  24
    On Kantians and Pragmatists: Kenneth Baynes's Habermas (review)
    European Journal of Philosophy 25 (3): 875-884. 2017.
    In this article I lay out Kenneth Baynes's interpretation of Habermas's social and political philosophy, and develop three lines of criticism. The first concerns the question of whether, and if so in what respect, Habermas's political theory counts as a critical social theory. I argue that it is not clear in what sense Habermas's political theory is a ‘critical’ social theory, and that Baynes's interpretation throws little light on this issue. The second related issue is to what extent it can be…Read more
  •  18
    To the things themselves again: observations on what things are and why they matter
    In Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison & Angela Piccini (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, Oxford University Press. 2013.
    What is a thing? It is an apparently simple question to which few philosophers or social scientists have devoted any serious attention. This chapter attempts to explain this neglect, and then to develop a way of thinking about the question by distinguishing things, and the concept ‘thing’, from objects and entities with which they are often conflated. This more refined and adequate conception of the thing is then deployed in order to help answer two related questions: ‘Why do things matter? What…Read more
  •  17
    Hegel and the Frankfurt School
    In Dean Moyar (ed.), The Oxford handbook of Hegel, Oxford University Press. pp. 718-742. 2017.
    A discussion of the Hegel and the Frankfurt School, with a focus on Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. It discusses in detail the different ways in which each of these major figures interprets Hegel, and it discusses the influence that Hegel had on on their respective theories.
  •  16
    Introduction : the Habermas Rawls dispute : analysis and re-evaluation
    with Fabian Freyenhagen
    In James Gordon Finlayson & Fabian Freyenhagen (eds.), Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political, Rouledge. 2010.
  •  14
    In this article I press four different objections on Forst’s theory of the ‘Right to Justification’. These are (i) that the principle of justification is not well-formulated; (ii) that ‘reasonableness and reciprocity’, as these notions are used by Rawls, are not apt to support a Kantian conception of morality; (iii) that the principle of justification, as Forst understands it, gives an inadequate account of what makes actions wrong; and (iv) that, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, F…Read more
  •  13
    A critical notice of Adorno and Existence
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (5): 723-730. 2017.
  •  12
    On wandering: Exile, migration and other questions in critical theory
    European Journal of Philosophy 29 (3): 664-673. 2021.
    European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 664-673, September 2021.
  •  9
    The Habermas Rawls Debate
    Columbia University Press. 2019.
    In this book, James Gordon Finlayson examines the Habermas-Rawls debate in context and considers its wider implications. He traces their dispute from its inception in their earliest works to the 1995 exchange and its aftermath, as well as its legacy in contemporary debates. Finlayson discusses Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, considering them as the essential background to the dispute and using them to lay out their different conceptions of justice, politics, …Read more
  •  9
    The Habermas–Rawls Dispute Redivivus
    Journal of International Political Theory 3 144-162. 2007.
    This article re-examines the Habermas–Rawls debate. It contends that what is at issue in this dispute has largely been missed. The standard view that principle and the original position form a useful point of comparison between their respective theories and that the dispute between them can be fruitfully understood on this basis is rejected. I show how this view has arisen and why it is wrong. The real issue between them lies in their respective accounts of the justification of political norms,a…Read more
  •  8
    Book reviews (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (4): 424-427. 1997.