Critique and philosophical justification: Seyla Benhabib and Rainer Forst in dialogue -- again

• Grant number: 17/24152-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: April 01, 2018
• End date: September 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Yara Adario Frateschi
• Grantee: Ana Cláudia Lopes Silveira
• Supervisor: Rainer Forst
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 15/11540-1 - Norm and utopia: the critical theory of Seyla Benhabib, BP.DD

Abstract

The aim of this research is to examine Seyla Benhabib and Rainer Forst's strategies for grounding the normative dimension of critical theory. Both Benhabib and Forst offer philosophical justifications for the normative and metanormative criteria guiding social criticism. Besides, they also take as their starting point attempts to reformulate Habermas's discourse principle maintaining its "practical insight." The now long-standing Benhabib-Forst exchange, however, highlights central divergences concerning the relation between morality, ethics, historicity, and critique. The present proposal addresses, first, a dispute between a historically self-conscious formulation of the universalizability principle and a recursive strategy to ground a principle of justification on the very idea of practical reason; second, a dispute on the scope of the moral point of view and the moral domain, that is, whether they must be conceived as continuous to ethical and political issues or are to be justified as free-standing and autonomous. This project is connected to a broader investigation on Seyla Benhabib's critical theory, which focuses on its normative foundations and the tasks for practical philosophy. (AU)