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Borrowed Reason: Jürgen Habermas and the Minds We Share
Paperback
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ISBN13: 9798188303471
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 21 2026
Pages: 340
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.71 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 21 2026
Pages: 340
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.71 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Every time you open your mouth to make a point, you make four silent promises. You promise that what you are saying is true, that you have a right to say it, that you mean it, and that it can be understood at all. You almost never think about these promises. Jürgen Habermas spent sixty years thinking about almost nothing else.
This is the story of the philosopher who refused to give up on reason at the exact moment his own tradition had decided reason was a swindle. Where others saw only power dressed up as truth, Habermas saw something stubborn and hopeful buried inside the most ordinary human act of all: two people trying to reach an understanding with words. Out of that unremarkable event he built one of the most ambitious theories of the twentieth century, a theory of law, democracy, morality, and the slow takeover of human life by money and administration.
It is also the story of a strange and beautiful gamble. To make his theory work, Habermas leaned the whole thing on a set of situations that have never once occurred and never will: a perfectly fair conversation, an argument with no clock and no exit, an agreement reached by everyone affected. He knew they were fictions. He made them load-bearing anyway. This book follows that gamble from a boy who could barely pronounce his own name to a public square remade by algorithms he lived just long enough to distrust, and asks the question that turns out to run underneath everything he wrote: what exactly is the use of things that do not exist?
Written for curious readers with no background in philosophy, and no patience for jargon, Borrowed Reason is a witty, humane, and quietly subversive guide to a thinker who believed the mind was never a private possession, but something we can only ever borrow from one another.
Keywords: Habermas, communication, democracy, reason, philosophy, public sphere, understanding
It is also the story of a strange and beautiful gamble. To make his theory work, Habermas leaned the whole thing on a set of situations that have never once occurred and never will: a perfectly fair conversation, an argument with no clock and no exit, an agreement reached by everyone affected. He knew they were fictions. He made them load-bearing anyway. This book follows that gamble from a boy who could barely pronounce his own name to a public square remade by algorithms he lived just long enough to distrust, and asks the question that turns out to run underneath everything he wrote: what exactly is the use of things that do not exist?
Written for curious readers with no background in philosophy, and no patience for jargon, Borrowed Reason is a witty, humane, and quietly subversive guide to a thinker who believed the mind was never a private possession, but something we can only ever borrow from one another.
Keywords: Habermas, communication, democracy, reason, philosophy, public sphere, understanding
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