The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a tour de force that has theimmediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounteracross, national cultural boundaries. Habermas takes up the challenge posed by theradical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism.Tracing theodyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity, Habermas's strategy is toreturn to those historical "crossroads" at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to this outcome. His aimis to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinatenegation of subject-centered reason through the concept of communicativerationality. As The Theory of Communicative Action served to place this conceptwithin the history of social theory, these lectures locate it within the history ofphilosophy. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse ofmodernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about theappropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range ofpast and present critics and theorists.The lectures on Georges Bataille, MichelFoucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note sincethey are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French andGerman thought. Habermas's dialogue with Foucault - begun in person as the first ofthese lectures were delivered in Paris in 1983 culminates here in two appreciativeyet intensely argumentative lectures. His discussion of the literary-theoreticalreception of Derrida in America - launched at Cornell in 1984 - issues here in along excursus on the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. Thelectures were reworked for the final time in seminars at Boston College and firstpublished in Germany in the fall of 1985.J?rgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophyat the University of Frankfurt. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is includedin the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by ThomasMcCarthy.

哈貝馬斯（1929一）

德國當代最負盛名的哲學傢和衽會理論傢，法蘭剋福學派第二代領軍人物。l929年生於杜塞爾多夫，五十年代前期先後在哥廷根、蘇黎世和波恩上大學，攻讀哲學、曆史學、心理學、經濟學等，後期曾在法蘭剋福社會研究所擔任阿多諾的助手。六十年代先後任海德堡大學哲學副教授和法蘭剋福大學哲學與社會學教授。1971年至l980年擔任馬剋斯·普朗剋學會“科技時代生存條件”研究所所長，1983年迴法蘭剋福大學任哲學教授，至1994年退休。哈貝馬斯知識淵博，學術興趣廣泛，並有著?烈的現實關懷，其理論的核心可以說是通過批判理論的“語言學轉嚮”，以交往行為理論來捍衛啓濛的現代性立場。主要著作除本書外還有：《公共領域的結構變遷》（1962），《作為“意識形態”的科學技術》（1968），《認知與興趣》（1968），《後期資本主義的閤法性問題》（1973），《曆史唯物主義的重建》（1976），《交往行為理論》（1981），《話語的倫理學》（1991），《後形而上學思想》（1992）。