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.

作者简介：

哈贝马斯(1929— )　德国当代最负盛名的哲学家和社会理论家,法兰克福学派第二代领军人物。1929年生于杜塞尔多夫,五十年代前期先后在哥廷根、苏黎世和波恩上大学,攻读哲学、历史学、心理学、经济学等,后期曾在法兰克福社会研究所担任阿多诺的助手。六十年代先后任海德堡大学哲学副教授和法兰克福大学哲学与社会学教授。1971年至1980年担任马克斯·普朗克学会“科技时代生存条件”研究所所长,1983年回法兰克福大学任哲学教授,至1994年退休。哈贝马斯知识渊博,学术兴趣广泛,并有着强烈的现实关怀,其理论的核心可以说是通过批判理论的“语言学转向”,以交往行为理论来捍卫启蒙的现代性立场。主要著作除本书外还有：《公共领域的结构变迁》(1962),《作为“意识形态”的科学技术》(1968),《认知与兴趣》(1968),《后期资本主义的合法性问题》(1973),《历史唯物主义的重建》(1976),《交往行为理论》(1981),《现代性的哲学话语》(1985),《话语的伦理学》(1991),《后形而上学思想》（1992）。