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Idealism And Pragmatism: "Transcendent" Validity Claims In Habermas's Democratic Theory, Richard Van Barriger

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In her recent article "Realism and Idealism: Was Habermas's Communicative Turn a Move in the Wrong Direction?" Maeve Cooke examines the evolution of Jürgen Habermas’s thought over the past five decades. According to Cooke, Habermas’s so-called ‘communicative turn’ was a necessary step in his philosophy’s systematic attempt to derive a universal norm from the immanent context of human practices and institutions. In her opinion, however, Habermas’s theory is unable to achieve such "transcendence from within" due to the inherent problem of justification in his theory’s treatment of normative validity claims. Cooke believes that despite Habermas’s exhaustive efforts to provide a …