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Jürgen Habermas Quotes
1929–2026 Germany
Jürgen Habermas (18 June 1929 – 14 March 2026) was a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, which he has based in his theory of communicative action.
Germany Academics Philosophers Sociologists Also known as: Habermas, Habermas, Jürgen, Jurgen Habermas
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The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.
The speaker must choose a comprehensible [verständlich] expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another.
Habermas (1979)
Reaching and understanding is the process of bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that are mutually recognized.
The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas—in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.
I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.
When sin turned into guilt, something was lost.
Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.
Science can only be comprehended epistemologically, which means as one category of possible knowledge, as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research.
All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects that [the norm's] general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests, and the consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation.
I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that voted against it, than if it was unanimous… Social psychology has amply shown the strength of this bandwagon effect.
Habermas (1993)
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.
The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a self-formative process, that is by the completion of self-reflection, and not in any unmistakable way by what the patient says or how he behaves
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