Jürgen Habermas has handed over the second part of his "Vorlass" to Frankfurt University Library:
"New Insights into Jürgen Habermas’ Intellectual Contributions"
See also: Dirk Knipphals's "Vorlass von Jürgen Habermas: Neunzig Aktenordner und auch sein privater Computer" (taz 08-11-2025).
Reviews of the English translation of Jürgen Habermas' "Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie": "Also a History of Philosophy" vol. 1 - 3 (Polity, 2023-25)
Çıdam, Volkan - "Habermas’s Genealogy of Rational Freedom – Vindicating Postmetaphysical Thought in Dialogue with Judeo-Christian Faith?", Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 2 (2025), pp. 219-228.
Evans, J. D. - "Jürgen Habermas, Also a History of Philosophy, volume 1-3", Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, online 21-09-2025. OPEN ACCESS
Hannam, Mark - "Defending Democracy", Times Literary Supplement, 23-02-2024.
Jay, Martin - "Also a History of Philosophy, Vol: II: The Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge", Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 06-05-2025. OPEN ACCESS
Maiden, Michael - "Jürgen Habermas: Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1", Phenomenological Reviews, 25 March 2024. OPEN ACCESS
McManus, Matt - “Jürgen Habermas Calls for Realizing the Ideals of Modernity, not Rejecting Them”, The Bias, 19-03-2025 (ChristianSocialism.com) [vol. 1+2] OPEN ACCESS
McManus, Matt - “Is Modern Philosophy Emancipating? Jürgen Habermas Thinks So”, The Bias, 28-08-2025 (ChristianSocialism.com) [vol. 3] OPEN ACCESS
Outhwaite, William - "Habermas, J. Also a History of Philosophy", Journal of Classical Sociology, forthcoming.
Rees, Dafydd Huw - "Also a history of philosophy, volume I; Jürgen Habermas", Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 24, no. 2 (2025), pp. 321-324. OPEN ACCESS
See my comprehensive bibliography of Habermas' "Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie" (2019) here.
Obituaries for Claus Offe:
* Peter A. Kraus (taz, 10-10-2025)
* Stephan Lessenich (Soziopolis, 09-10-2025)
* Alfred J. Noll (Der Falter, 06-10-2025)
* Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) (06-10-2025)
* The Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (IWM) (06-10-2025)
* Steffen Mau & Michael Zürn (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 04-10-2025)
* Johan Schloemann (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 04-10-2025)
* Michael Hesse (Frankfurter Rundschau, 04-10-2025)
* The Hertie School, Berlin (02-10-2025)
Press release from the Hertie School, Berlin:
"The Hertie School community mourns the passing of Professor Claus Offe"
Religion im Spannungsfeld zwischen Erfahrung und Begriff
Hrsg. von Michael Roseneck, Annette Langner-Pitschmann & Tobias Müller
(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2025), Open access
Inhalt
Einleitung - Michael Roseneck, Annette Langner-Pitschmann & Tobias Müller
Ein Geburtstagsgruß - Jürgen Habermas
I. Freiheit erfahren im Horizont sozialer Anerkennung
Gleichheit, Anrufung, Befreiung: Drei Vektoren der Anerkennung - Christoph Menke
Hegels Konzeption des kosmischen Körpers und das Absolute - Kurt Appel
Christliche Sozialethik und immanente Kritik - Christof Mandry
Exodus als Figur einer kritischen Philosophie - Michael Reder
Rückkehr der Schuld - Peter Niesen
Die "Banalität des Bösen" – revisited - Knut Wenzel
Hegel und der Sozialismus - Axel Honneth
II. Säkularität reflektieren im Kontext der Spätmoderne
Üb/ersetzung der Religion: Habermas liest Spinoza - Martin Saar
Spinoza’s Quasi-Fictionalist Account of Religion - Michael A. Rosenthal
"Eine Art Delirium"? Bindungsenergien und Einheitsrepräsentation bei Durkheim - Michael Moxter
Die Methode der Isolierung - Rainer Forst
"Religion hat denselben Zweck, denselben Inhalt wie die Philosophie" - Herta Nagl-Docekal
III. Religion denken unter nachmetaphysischen Bedingungen
"Vom Gott der Philosophen halte ich gar nichts." Philosophische Gotteslehre im nachmetaphysischen Zeitalter? - Oliver J. Wiertz
Falsche Hoffnungen - Heiko Schulz
Was nicht gesagt werden kann und was nicht gesagt werden darf - Hartmut Westermann
Splitter einer „Versprachlichung des Sakralen“ - Thomas Hanke
Existenzfragen - Ingolf U. Dalferth
Zeit – Sprache – Transzendenz - Hans-Joachim Höhn
Leif Wenar has updated his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on John Rawls.
See also Leif Wenar's paper "A Society of Self-Respect" (2023, PDF). A shorter version of the paper appears in Paul Weithman (ed), Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at 50 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Oliver Eberl and Sonja Buckel are organizing a conference on November 20–21 in memory of Ingeborg Maus, who passed away in December last year. The conference, entitled “Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie heute. Anschlüsse an Ingeborg Maus”, will take place at the University of Marburg. All those interested are warmly invited to attend.
Participants include Hubertus Buchstein, Reinhard Mehring, Howard Williams, Ursula Birsl, Hauke Brunkhorst, Martin Welsch, and Soraya Nour.
See the program here.
Wolfgang Kuhlmann dies at 85:
Thomas Grundmann - "Meister der Transzendentalpragmatik" (FAZ)
Also as: "Zum Tod von Wolfgang Kuhlmann – Selbstbestimmtheit als Ideal" (Frankfurter Rundschau)
Special Issue of the Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, July 2025:
"Dialectic of Enlightenment" at 80 – New Readings (open access)
Ed. by Fabian Freyenhagen.
Four books on Jürgen Habermas coming this autumn/winter:
* John Abromeit, Matthew Dimick & Paul Linden-Retek (eds.), Critical Encounters with Habermas’s Political and Legal Theory (Leiden: Brill, October 2025)
* Amirhosein Khandizaji & James J. Chriss (eds.), Habermas and the Transformations of Critical Theory. Faces of Critique (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, October 2025)
* Philipp Felsch, The Philosopher. Habermas and Us (Cambridge: Polity Press, October 2025) [German edition, 2024]
* Wiliam Outhwaite & Larry Ray (eds.), The Elgar Companion to Jürgen Habermas (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, December 2025)
See also my bibliography on recent secondary literature on Habermas.
Interview with Habermas in "The Nation":
"Jürgen Habermas Still Believes in Modernity" [open access]
Excerpt:
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: The origins of critical theory lie in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the critique of power, ideology, and domination. These ideas are less present in your book [Also a History of Philosophy], even though they played a major role in your previous works. Where do you situate your book in relation to critical theory in the broad sense?
Jürgen Habermas: In the preface to my book, I referred to the 1937 essay by Horkheimer and Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” from the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which can be considered the founding document of Critical Theory. I remain indebted to this source for the basic social-theoretical assumptions that informed the background of my history of philosophy. But these assumptions themselves are not the theme of the book. On the other hand, if you ask what has become of my connection to the tradition of Western Marxism, I would remind you that the research of Critical Theory was focused from its beginnings on explaining the unexpected stability of capitalism despite all its crises. And as far as my involvement in West German day-to-day politics was concerned, I must confess that, as a leftist, I was mainly preoccupied with the struggle to liberalize the political mentality of a population that initially remained deeply attached to the Nazi regime.
As far as capitalist development was concerned, a revolutionary transformation of the liberal economic order established since the end of the Second World War was in any case no longer feasible under the conditions of systemic competition with the Soviet regime. And since the end of the Cold War even less so. From the postwar period onwards, my own interest was directed toward welfare state reforms that, if sufficiently radical, could change capitalist democracies beyond recognition. However, in the shadow of the declining superpower, we are currently witnessing the emergence of new fronts with the infiltration of liberal democracies from the right, both nationally and globally Currently, we would be satisfied if our capitalist democracies could defend themselves against a takeover by right-wing populism—but even that might well be no longer possible without extensive reforms of capitalism.
***
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has posted Jürgen Habermas's answer to a question about Hegel — one that didn’t make it into the published version of the interview — on Bluesky. You can read it here (pdf).
Michel Rosenfeld has uploaded a new paper on Habermas:
“Habermas’ Paradigms of Law and Dialectics” [open access]
(Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper, no. 2025-16)
Abstract:
"In his magisterial Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy, published in the 1990’s, Jürgen Habermas argues for a proceduralist deliberative legal paradigm consistent with his discourse ethics. Relying on Kant and Rousseau, Habermas’ deliberative proceduralism considers constitutions and other important laws legitimate if they discursively call for a consensus as being both universalizable and self-given among all those subjected to them. The 1990’s saw a proliferation of national and transnational constitutions or constitution-like legal regimes throughout the globe. This prompted Habermas, with special focus on the EU, to promote the concept of “constitutional patriotism” as a means toward proceduralist legitimation of legal regimes binding together otherwise largely divergent populations.
Much has changed by the mid-2020’s with the rise of anti-pluralistic populism and illiberalism. Does this undermine the attractiveness or viability of Habermas’ proceduralist legal paradigm?
This chapter maintains that it does if Habermas’ treatment of the sequence of the three legal paradigms that he analyzes—the legal bourgeois one, followed by the social welfare one, which eventually yields to the proceduralist one—is approached dialectically. On the surface, Habermas’ theory is undialectical and he explicitly parts company with Hegel and Marx. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that Habermas’ treatment of his three paradigms is best understood dialectically. Habermas himself postulates that all legal paradigms confront the dialectics between legal and factual equality. Moreover, considering the differences between Habermas’ theory and Kant’s and Rousseau’s, on the one hand, and certain key affinities between Habermas and Hegel, on the other, leads to the conclusion that the dialectical interpretive perspective is thee most rewarding. Notably, it follows from this that the mid2020’s require a transition to a fourth paradigm that must be, at least in part, substantive."
