Critical Theory

by David Couzens Hoy, Thomas A. McCarthy

Philosophical controversies within contemporary critical theory arise largely from questions about the nature, scope and limits of human reason. As the linguistic turn in 20th-century philosophy has increasingly given way to a socio-critical turn, traditional ideas of pure reason have been left further behind. But there is considerable disagreement about what that shift entails for enlightenment ideals of self-consciousness, self-determination and self-realization. In this book, two philosophers bring those disagreements into focus around a set of familiar philosophical issues concerning reason and the rational subject, truth and representation, knowledge and objectivity, identity and difference, relativism and universalism, the right and the good. But these perennial problems are resituated within the context of critical theory as it has developed from the work of the Frankfurt Schools in the 1930s and 1940s, taking in the multiplicity of contemporary genealogical, hermeneutic, neopragmatist, deconstructive and reconstructive.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

David Couzens Hoy is Distinguished Professor of Philosphy Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.