Truth and Justification.

• Author: St. John, Jeffrey
• Position: Book Review

Truth and Justification. By Jurgen Habermas. Translated by Barbara Fultner. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. pp. xxii + 327. $40.00.

Truth and Justification collects seven essays loosely organized around two problems Habermas identifies in contemporary postmetaphysical philosophy. The first problem is the lack of an adequately thematized deontological framework in which morally valid norms for public deliberation might be grounded. Of special interest to Habermas are norms capable of fostering inclusive decision-making amid and across moments of moral dissensus among members of a discourse community. The second problem, conceived broadly and treated less technically than the first, warns of the potential irrelevance of some linguistic and political philosophies whose grasp of moral argument is, Habermas implies, in eclipse or close to it. The first five essays primarily explore the first problem while the last two tackle the second.

In an introduction subtitled "Realism after the Linguistic Turn," Habermas sets the stage for the two lines of inquiry that follow. Eyeing the detranscendentalized subject in practical philosophy, he writes: "I have in mind the question of what can provide the moral orientation for the very practice whose goal it is to determine the conditions for rational judgment formation and for the reasonableness of moral action" (p. 10). In effect he asks: Can argumentative fora divested of their prior foundationalist (or "justification-transcendent") assumptions face and resolve irreducibly moral problems in a way that might satisfy all parties? Habermas undertakes a characteristically rigorous and wide-ranging engagement of this question.

Chapter One reviews two major strands of post-Kantian thinking: 1) The hermeneutic tradition from Humboldt through Heidegger; and 2) the analytic tradition in Frege and in (parts of) Wittgenstein. Habermas charges each tradition's adherents with a failure to consider the practical consequences of the denuded fora described above for a range of extra-semantic concerns and--especially--for moral discourse. Linguistic thinkers, he suggests, have removed meaning from the very arenas where it is most needed, while analytic theorists' aversion to claims of transcendence has prompted their withdrawal into games of logic that contribute little to public problem-solving.

Habermas pursues these themes jointly in Chapter Two's summary of the use of reason since Kant. For Habermas, a chronicling of...