Does Philosophy Require De-Transcendentalization? Habermas, Apel, and the Role of Transcendentals in Philosophical Discourse and Social-Scientific Explanation

• Authors: Anna Michalska
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The heritage of transcendental philosophy, and more specifically its viability when it comes to the problematic of the philosophy of social sciences, has been a key point of dissensus between Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Whereas Apel has explicitly aimed at a transcendental-pragmatic transformation of philosophy, Habermas has consequently insisted that his formal pragmatics, and the theory of communicative action which is erected upon it, radically de-transcendentalizes the subject. In a word, the disagreement concerns whether transcendental entities have any substantial role to play in philosophical discourse and social-scientific explanations. My aim is to reconstruct how Apel establishes a connection between transcendentals, qua the ideal communicative community and the possibility of non-objectifying self-reflection. As I shall demonstrate, the principles that transcendental pragmatics sees as underlying social actions are not to be understood in a strictly judicial way, as “supernorms.” Rather, they should be conceptualized and used as a means for action regulation and mutual action coordination. Against this backdrop, I show that the concept of the ideal community provides the necessary underpinnings for Habermas’ schema of validity claims and the project of reconstructive sciences.

Keywords

EN

citizen participation; urban governance; public space; urban design; public art; urban regeneration; bottom-up processes

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Philosophica. Ethica – Aesthetica – Practica
• Year: 2019
• Issue: 34
• Pages: 11-30

Dates

published

2019-12-30

Contributors

author

Anna Michalska

• Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii PAN

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2551-4556

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Identifiers

DOI

10.18778/0208-6107.34.02