Into the Language Barrier: Analysis of the Debates of Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas with Concentration on the Importance of Philosophy of Language

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) and Charles Taylor (b. 1931) are two of the most important philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Throughout their lengthy bodies of work, spanning from the 1960s and continuing today, they were frequent interlocutors, and often responded to one another’s theories and arguments. They also engaged in direct debates in edited volumes to which they both contributed, including Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action (1991), Multiculturalism (1994), and The Power of Religion in the Public Square (2011). The goal of this dissertation is to catalogue and analyze Habermas and Taylor’s debates. I do not suggest that there is a single key to understanding these debates. I nevertheless emphasize throughout this work that their positions on philosophy of language, influence their positions on nearly all other matters on which they debate. I also suggest that their explicit positions on a given topic are often closer than they themselves acknowledge. This is often because of a difference in emphasis, or because they modified their positions through their careers. I first analyze their debates on recognition relying on the volume Multiculturalism, tracing their disagreements to a difference in social ontology which is bound with their philosophies of language. I next analyze their debates on moral philosophy. Each figure’s difference here again draws on their philosophy of language, with Habermas relying on the structure of the procedure of moral argumentation while Taylor relies on a view of language intertwined with self and communal interpretation that can result in incommensurability. I then analyze their direct debates on language, noting the difference in emphasis, with Habermas focusing on the problem solving capacity of, while Taylor insists on the creative power of language. Finally, I examine some of their contemporary debates on democracy and religion, noting that the same points of emphasis for each figure are recapitulated on these somewhat more applied topics.