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379Rituals 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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316Existential Social Theory After the Poststructuralist and Communication TurnsHuman Studies 25 (2): 147-164. 2002.Thomas Flynn's work on Sartre and Foucault, the first of a two-volume project, offers a unique opportunity for examining an existential theory of history. It occasions rethinking existential-social categories from the vantage point of the poststructuralist turn. And it contributes to developing existential variants of critical theory. The following questions guide me in each of the three above areas. First, how is human history intelligible, given not only our finite sense of ourselves but also …Read more
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149Becoming human, becoming SoberContinental Philosophy Review 42 (2): 249-274. 2009.Two themes run through Kierkegaard’s authorship. The first defines existential requirements for “becoming human”—reflective honesty and earnest humor. The second demarcates the religious phenomena of sobriety when human becoming suffers insurmountable collisions. Living with existential pathos teaches the difference between the either/or logic of collisions and the both/and logic of development and transitions. There is a difference between self-transformation and a progressive individual and so…Read more
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149Contribution to a new critical theory of multiculturalism: A response to 'anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification'Philosophy and Social Criticism 28 (4): 473-482. 2002.
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116Habermas's reading of Kierkegaard: Notes from a conversationPhilosophy and Social Criticism 17 (4): 313-323. 1991.
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33Identity 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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26International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Corsair Affair, Vol. 13International Philosophical Quarterly 32 (4): 524-526. 1992.
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25Between 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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24"More than all the others": Meditation on responsibilityCritical Horizons 8 (1): 47-60. 2007.This essay examines one aspect of the wide-ranging philosophical background of the intellectual and dissident movement for human rights in one-time communist Czechoslovakia. I shall meditate on Jan Patočka 's finite responsibility, Derrida's aporetic emphasis on the infinite dimension of responsibility, and Lévinasian-Dostoyevskyan ethico-existential variations on in/finite responsibility. Havel alludes to hyperbolic ethics in a parenthetical remark on the birth of "Charta 77", the Manifesto for…Read more
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24Singular Existence and Critical TheoryRadical Philosophy Review 8 (2): 211-223. 2005.Two questions were addressed to my existential biography of Habermas: Is my use of existential categories to discuss his theorycompatible with his recovery of the publicity of facts and norms? Can I concede a secular reading of anamnestic solidarity to Habermas and retain this conception to sustain a Benjaminian-Kierkegaardian openness of history? The best answer would be to reprint Habermas’s astonishing autobiography from Kyoto (his thank you speech on the occasion of the Koyto Award on 11 Nov…Read more
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21Habermas' turn?Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 (1): 21-36. 2006.How a thinker comes to adopt or change a view may be regarded as either a strictly theoretical or biographical issue. First, looking backward at my completed philosophical-political profile of Habermas, I elucidate how biographical methodology can yield a coherent yet dynamically evolving profile rather than a static portrait. Second, examining Habermas’ thinking after 2000, the year my published biography of him ends, I venture a biographical-philosophical hypothesis that in what appears to be …Read more
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20Habermas’ turn?Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 (1): 21-36. 2006.How a thinker comes to adopt or change a view may be regarded as either a strictly theoretical or biographical issue. First, looking backward at my completed philosophical-political profile of Habermas, I elucidate how biographical methodology can yield a coherent yet dynamically evolving profile rather than a static portrait. Second, examining Habermas thinking after 2000, the year my published biography of him ends, I venture a biographical-philosophical hypothesis that in what appears to be …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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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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13How `Unfinished' should the Project of Humanism be?Theory, Culture and Society 20 (4): 143-152. 2003.
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12Merleau-Ponty on Taking the Attitude of the OtherJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 22 (1): 44-52. 1991.
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10Review of Andrew Buchwalter's "Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age"
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9Which 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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9From 'Theoretical Cleansing' to Basic Philosophical Rights: A ManifestoProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67 (6). 1994.
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Arizona State UniversityRegular Faculty
Tempe, Arizona, United States of America