The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere. In 2014, Prospect readers chose Habermas as one of their favourites among the "world's leading thinkers". Thomas McCarthy is the author of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, published by Wiley.

Introduction by Thomas McCarthy vii

Preface xix

I Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance 1

II Hegel's Concept of Modernity 23

Excursus on Schiller's" Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" 45

III Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche 51

Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm 75

IV The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point 83

V The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno 106

VI The Undermining of Western Rationalism through the Critique of Metaphysics: Martin Heidegger 131

VII Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism 161

Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature 185

VIII Between Eroticism and General Economics: Georges Bataille 211

IX The Critique of Reason as an Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault 238

X Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again 266

XI An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject- Centered Reason 294

Excursus on Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution 327

XII The Normative Content of Modernity 336

Excursus on Luhmann's Appropriation of the Philosophy of the Subject through Systems Theory 368

Notes 386

Name Index 423

Subject and Title Index 427