Document Type : Scientific-research

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Tehran

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate how Habermas’ idea of the universality of modernity is driven by the unsubstantiated assumption that takes this notion to be founded on occidental rationality. In carrying out this task, I first reveal the inherent contradiction of a concept of rationality which seeks to establish itself as the basis of modernity, while at the same time declaring legitimate recognition of its other. Briefly stated, excluding non-Western occidental from the foundation of modernity belies the fundamental requirement of universality, namely the inclusion of the other. This encapsulates what I shall refer to as “The Dichotomous Logic of Exclusive Inclusion” which has engendered philosophical and historical criticisms in both non-Western and Western thought. In the second section of this paper, I shall argue that it is necessary for the “non-Western Other” to push itself away from the margins and to the forefront of the discussion of universality, in order to be recognized as fundamental to the development of a genuine notion of universality that is guided by the contribution of all cultures. 

Keywords

Main Subjects

Bernstein, Jay M., (1995), Recovering Ethical Life: Juergen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory. London.
Borradori, Giovanna., (2003), Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Cooke, Maeve., (1997), Language and Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Corbett, Lee., (2006), Regarding others: Habermas and Derrida on terrorism,” Available online at: http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2004/03/corbett.html Aceede !5 October 2006.
Devenney, Mark., (2004), Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory: Between Critical Theory and Post-Marxism, London: Routledge.
Duvenage, Pieter., (2003), Habermas and Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Schluchter, Wolfgang., (1998), Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities--A Comparative View Dadalus 127.Pp 4-6.
Gole, Nilufer., (2000), Snapshots of Islamic Modernities, Daedalus, 129, no. 1: 91-117.
Habermas, jurgen., (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (1992), Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Juergen Habermas. Ed, P. Dews. London: Verso.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (2003), The Future of Human Nature.Cambridge: Polity.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (1979), Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin,” trans, Philip Brewster and Carl Howard Buchner, New German Critique 17.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (1984), Theory of Communicative Action, vol.1. Beacon Press.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (1987), Theory of Communicative Action, vol.2. Beacon Press.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (2006), Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2006): 1-25.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (2006), Time of Transitions. Translated by Max Pensky, Cited and argued in
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (2002), Rationality and Religion: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, ed. by Eduardo Mendieta, Cambridge: Polity.
Hofheinz, Albrecht., (1996), Illumination and Enlightenment Revisited or: Pietism and the Roots of Islamic Modernity. University of Bergen. Available online at:http://folk.uio.no/albrech/Hofheinz_IllumEnlightenment, pdf.Pp.1-19.
Karrar, Ali Salih., (1992), The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan. London.
Li, Victor., (2005), “Rationality and Loss: Habermas and the Recovery of the Pre-modern Other.” Parallax, Volume 11, Number 3:72-86.
McCarthy, Thomas., (1984), Translator’s Introduction.” In Habermas, Jurgen. Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Volume 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action Boston: Beacon Press. Pp vi-xxxix.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ., (1984a), The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
Misgeld, Dieter., (1983), Communication and Societal Rationalization: A Review Essay of Jurgen Habermas’s Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns. Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 8, No. 4.: 433-453.
Najjar, Fauzi M., (2004), “Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and the Egyptian enlightenment movement.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 31(2) 2004:195 – 213.
Nemoianu, Virgil., (2006), “The Church and the Secular Establishment: A Philosophical Dialog between Joseph Ratzinger and Jurgen Habermas.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture - Volume 9, Number 2, Pp 16-42.
O’Fahey, Rex Sean., (1990), Enigmatic Saint: Ahmad Ibn Idris and the Idrisi Tradition.London.
Passerin, E. M. & Benhabib, S., (1997), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Payrow Shabani, Omid., (2003), Democracy, Power, and Legitimacy: The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Roderick, Rick., (1986), Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Rudolph, Peters., (1990), Reinhard Schulze’s Quest for an Islamic Enlightenment in Die Welt des Islams New Sen Bd. 30 Nr. 1/4. 1990: 160-162.
Schulze, Reinhard., (1990), Das islamische achtzehnte Jahrhundert: Versuch einer historiographischen Kritik in:  Die Welt des Islams 30: 140-159.