Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie

Jürgen Habermas's new book is also a history of philosophy. It provides information in the style of a genealogy about how the currently dominant forms of Western post-metaphysical thought have emerged. The discourse on faith and knowledge, which has arisen from two strong axial traditions in the Roman Empire, serves as a guiding thread. Habermas traces how philosophy has gradually disentangled itself from its symbiosis with religion and has secularized. From a systematic perspective, he highlights the crucial conflicts, learning processes, and turning points, as well as the accompanying transformations in science, law, politics, and society. However, Jürgen Habermas's new book is not just a history of philosophy. It is also a reflection on the task of a philosophy that upholds the reasonable freedom of communicatively socialized subjects: it aims to clarify what our growing scientific knowledge of the world means for us – for us as human beings, as modern contemporaries, and as individual persons.