Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer
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conclusion of the book when he argues for the indispensability of ‘liberal political theory’, claiming that a renunciation of liberalism is ‘not a morally serious posture, in the strict Kantian sense that one could not coherently will that others adopt this renunciation as a universal principle of action’ (p. 197). This form of transcendental argument (a slightly modified version of the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’) sits, in my view, rather uneasily with his Dewey-inspired post-foundational pragmatism. All in all, Culture and Democracy is an impressive work that brings important contemporary theory to bear on a normatively inflected, yet concrete, analysis of media policy and politics in three different public spheres. Robert Porter University of Ulster, UK.
Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald and Jens Kertscher (eds.) The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002, xiv þ 363pp. ISBN: 0 262 13403 9 / 0 262 63247 0. Max Weber’s Central Question Wilhelm Hennis (translated by Keith Tribe) Threshold Press, Oxford, 2000, x þ 241pp. ISBN: 1 903152 01 1. Max Weber’s Science of Man: New Studies for a Biography of the Work Wilhelm Hennis (translated by Keith Tribe) Threshold Press, Oxford, 2000, ix þ 220pp. ISBN: 1 903152 00 3. Contemporary Political Theory (2005) 4, 201–204. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300171
The Federal Republic of Germany, born of political humiliation but heir to a proud cultural and philosophical heritage, was the site of what Manfred Riedel called ‘the rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ (Riedel, 1972). This practical philosophy was intended to be independent of both Western liberalism and eastern communism. Its proximate sources were German. Given what many considered to be the special relationship of modern German culture to the culture of classical Greece, it was often claimed that practical philosophy also had more distant, Greek sources. What was supposedly being rehabilitated was nothing less than the classical philosophy of ethics and politics. Practical philosophy Contemporary Political Theory 2005 4
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therefore reached back to a time before the Enlightenment’s separation of facts from values, and well before Marxism’s separation of ‘praxis’ from ethics. The ‘practice’ of practical philosophy was, more specifically, the praxis of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Its ethics was the kind of ethos or habit that Aristotle identified with human excellence. Its politics were more diffuse. They were conservative in that the ethos they sought to promote was one of lawabiding respectability, and in that they aimed at social stability. Given the disastrous results of Germany’s recent revolutionary politics of both left and right, this is unsurprising. Practical philosophy’s politics were also conservative in that they were separated from production and trade. The primary fault of Western liberalism, and still more of eastern communism, was that the practice of political judgment and action was not clearly differentiated fr
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