Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 13:43:19 -0500 ()
From: Tom Farrell <tfarrell-AT-d.umn.edu>
Subject: HAB: Reply to Lapitan


Dong Lapitan asked about efforts to relate Habermas' thought
specifically to Aquinas' metaphysical thought, and one individual
posted a reply.  Perhaps a second reply is in order.

Some theologians have engaged Habermas' thought in the collection
_Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology_, edited by D. S.
Browning and Francis Schussler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad,
1992).  It includes Habermas' essay "Transcendence from Within,
Transcendence in This World."

Hugo A. Meynell of the University of Calgary provides a judicious
discussion and critique of Habermas in _Rediscovering Philosophy:
Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge from Plato to Lonergan_
(University of Toronto Press, 1998).  The closing paragraph of
Meynell's chapter on Habermas is worth quoting in its entirety:

"I conclude by putting a dilemma to Habermas.  Either his critical
theory can show how we have cognitive access to a world which
exists largely prior to and independently of ourselves or it
cannot.  If it cannot, it collapses into postmodernist scepticism
and relativism which Habermas is rightly concerned to contest.  If
it can, it must inevitably issue in that kind of `totalizing' view
of reality which Habermas insists that modernism has outgrown, and
indeed one that yields a `metaphysics' or `first philosophy' of a
very traditional cast." (p. 237)

As the subtitle of Meynell's book indicates, he works with
Lonergan's reflections on the way of knowing, most notably in
_Insight: A Study of Human Understanding_ (published in a critical
edition by the University of Toronto Press, 1992, as volume three
of his collected works).

William Rehg has briefly but significantly explored Lonergan's
account of human understanding in connection with Habermas' thought
in _Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jurgen
Habermas_ (University of California Press, 1994, pp. 84-87).

Rehg has more fully explored the connections between Lonergan and
Habermas in "From Logic to Rhetoric in Science: A Formal-Pragmatic
Reading of Lonergan's _Insight_" in _Communication and Lonergan_,
edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Kansas City: Sheed
& Ward, 1993, pp. 153-172).

I hope that Dong Lapitan finds these references helpful.

--Tom Farrell


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