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8Revolutionary Hope: Essays in Honor of William L. Mcbride (edited book)Lexington Books. 2013.Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as one of the most esteemed and accomplished philosophers of his generation. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students and pays tribute to McBride’s considerable achievements as a teacher, mentor, and scholar
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13Which Axial Age, whose rituals? Habermas and Jaspers on the ‘spiritual’ situation of the present agePhilosophy and Social Criticism 47 (6): 753-766. 2021.Can we keep relying on sources of values dating back to the Axial Age, or do cognitive changes in the present age require a completely new foundation? An uncertainty arises with the crisis of values that can support the human in the age of artificial intelligence. Should we seek contemporary access points to the archaic origins of the species? Or must we also imagine new Anthropocenic-Axial values to reground the human event? In his most recent work, Habermas affirms the continuing importance of…Read more
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437Rituals and Algorithms: Genealogy of Reflective Faith and Postmetaphysical ThinkingEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (4): 163-184. 2019.What happens when mindless symbols of algorithmic AI encounter mindful performative rituals? I return to my criticisms of Habermas’ secularising reading of Kierkegaard’s ethics. Next, I lay out Habermas’ claim that the sacred complex of ritual and myth contains the ur-origins of postmetaphysical thinking and reflective faith. If reflective faith shares with ritual same origins as does communicative interaction, how do we access these archaic ritual sources of human solidarity in the age of AI?
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Memory and Countermemory: For an Open FutureIn Lester Embree & Hwa Jung (eds.), Political Phenomenology: Essays in Memory of Petee Jung, Springer Verlag. 2016.
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Kierkegaard in Post/ModernityRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 193 (1): 120-120. 2003.
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34Identity or Roots, Idol or Icon?Radical Philosophy Review 9 (1): 65-77. 2006.What does race add to class, as both are secular social categories? The difficulties of invidious nationalism and the conservation of races that would not foment holy wars of terror persist for both secular or postsecular theorists. Postsecular thinkers are in a stronger position than a secular theorist to challenge religiously inflected social integrations, invidious nationalism, and fundamentalism.Unmasking them as social formation proffers an external criticism, to speak of them as sacralizat…Read more
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Habermas and Kierkegaard on Post-Traditional Identity: A Study in Communicative and Existential EthicsDissertation, Fordham University. 1991.In this study on post-nationalist and post-traditional identity I address critically the multicultural audiences of Europe and the USA. I reflect on Habermas's notions of constitutional patriotism and permanent democratic revolution, Kierkegaard's requirements of self-appropriation and existential living, and Havel's Levinasian dramatization of vertical identity in the Czechoslovak 1989 existential, 'velvet' revolution. ;Habermas asks what post-traditional life-form integrates socially Kierkegaa…Read more
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3Contradictory interpretations have been applied to history-making events that led to the end of the cold war: Václav Havel, using Kierkegaardian terms, called the demise of totalitarianism in east-central Europe an "existential revolution"'' (i.e. an awakening of human responsibility, spirit, and reason), while others hailed it as a victory for the "New World Order." Regardless of one''s point of view, however, it is clear that the global landscape has been dramatically altered. Where once the c…Read more
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7International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Corsair Affair, Vol. 13 (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 32 (4): 524-526. 1992.
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11Between Hope and TerrorEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (1): 1-18. 2004.His Paulskirche speech on October 14, 2001, marked Habermas’s turn to public criticism of the unilateral politics of global hegemony as he promoted a globaldomestic and human rights policy. Two years later he joined ranks with Jacques Derrida against the eight “new” Europeans who lent signatures to the second Gulf War. Lest we misjudge the joint letter by Habermas and Derrida as peculiarly Eurocentric and even oblivious to the worldwide nature of the antiwar protest on February 15, 2003, we must…Read more
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9Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy After PostmodernityNorthwestern University Press. 2002.This collection of essays is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. It begins with an overview of philosophy's role and responsibility or "task" and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's mos…Read more
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10Review of Andrew Buchwalter's "Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age"
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Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (New York: Guilford)., and Havel. 1995.“Derrida and Habermas on the Aporia of the Politics of Identity and Difference:. 1995.“Derrid Towards Radical Democratic Multiculturalism.” (review)Constellations 1 (3): 383-98. 1993.
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Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World Order (Fred Evans)Continental Philosophy Review 33 (1): 107-112. 2000.
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15Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular MeditationsIndiana University Press. 2008.No one will deny that we live in a world where evil exists. But how are we to come to grips with human atrocity and its diabolical intensity? Martin Beck Matuštík considers evil to be even more radically evil than previously thought and to have become all too familiar in everyday life. While we can name various moral wrongs and specific cruelties, Matuštík maintains that radical evil understood as a religious phenomenon requires a religious response where the language of hope, forgiveness, redem…Read more
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19Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (edited book)Indiana University Press. 1995."This volume represents a fine assessment of the continuing applicability of Kierkegaard’s thought for the 21st century."—The Reader’s Review "Matustík and Westphal have set some agile minds to the task of drawing out the threads of Kierkegaard’s influence on postmodern and contemporary philosophy, from gender to politics and from Buber to Derrida." —Choice "... Usefully and effectively establishes Kierkegaard as a living presence in contemporary thought. It will help students of Kierkegaard att…Read more
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7Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World OrderState University of New York Press. 1998.Advocates a new existential and political coalition among critical and postmodern social theorists and among critical gender, race, and class theorists, in dissent from the New World Order, to raise specters of liberation and empower radical democratic change
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7Jurgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political ProfileRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2001.This philosophical-political profile offers the first of its kind intellectual reconstruction of HabermasOs defining existential and historical situations, his generational profile and interventions, his impact on as well as the discontents that his life work generates in others. In this work the reader is taken on a journey with Habermas through the 20th-century intellectual and political history from the defeat of Nazism, to the Cold War restoration of the 1950s, the student movement of the 19…Read more
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16How `Unfinished' should the Project of Humanism be?Theory, Culture and Society 20 (4): 143-152. 2003.
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Between Hope and Terror: Habermas and Derrida Plead for the Im/PossibleIn Lasse Thomassen, Jacques Derrida & Jürgen Habermas (eds.), The Derrida-Habermas reader, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 278. 2006.
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1Derrida and habermas on the aporias of the politics of identity and difference: Towards radical democratic multiculturalismFilosoficky Casopis 43 (4): 633-652. 1995.
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Arizona State UniversityRegular Faculty
Tempe, Arizona, United States of America