A quarterly review of philosophy.

The explicit ambition of this collection is to move 'beyond' the Universal Pragmatics of Jürgen Habermas. It is without doubt an ambitious programme whose architect has led since the 1960s a series of reflections on the rational potential of western society from the Enlightenment to the present. However, this theoretical emphasis on the irreducibility of the rational content of debate cannot avoid abstracting communicative universals from the empirical communication practices which are always embedded in multiple contexts of discourse, identity, media and institutions. This tension in Habermas's oeuvre has developed an antagonistic potential. An example of this antagonism can be seen in the distorting effects of a normative theory of communication whose very normativity means turning a blind eye to a history of social communication. For example, Habermas infamously neglects the constitutive role played by the media in constructions of what is held to be 'public' and even his more recent revisions do not resolve this dilemma. The nine contributions in this volume from the fields of psychology, politics, media, epistemology and aesthetics set out to move beyond the influence of communicative universals and propose alternative approaches to the challenge of reconciling autonomy, interaction and social organisation.

Despite the revival of intellectual history in recent years, there is still relatively little research into German-Jewish intellectual history between 1933 and 1938. The present work studies for the first time the important discussions of the period from the debate between Leo Strauss and Julius Guttmann, Alexander Altmann’s contribution to “Jewish theology,” to the reception of the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger as well as the works of David Baumgardt and Fritz Heinemann. Many now forgotten texts of those discussions have been made accessible here. All the leading figures presented in this study were sooner or later forced to choose between “philosophy” and “law.”