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Manfred Frank,
The Boundaries of Agreement
Contemporary European Cultural Studies
Series editors, Gianni
Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
In this monograph, Manfred Frank
comments on a fictional debate — one about dissension and consensus.
Though it did not actually occur between Jean François Lyotard and
Jürgen Habermas, it is presented here in the form of an imaginary
conversation. This is about something fundamental: sensing the line
of demarcation that separates the understanding-oriented exchange of
arguments on the one hand from insistence on dispute and, on the
other, an incoherent pluralism of remarks. Is the consensus theory
too harmonistic? Can the search for harmony show traits of
discursive power? Or, can the thesis be supported, that conflict may
not be resolved in the absence of universally accepted rules of
arbitration, without contradiction; that is, without raising any
validity claims? The responses to these questions demonstrate
whether we — as Lyotard believes — have grown irrevocably out of the
interpretation reserves of the “Occident” (in its last stamping as
“the Modern”), or whether the Modern — as Habermas assumes — has
the ability to learn self-criticism.
Author
Manfred Frank is a professor of philosophy at the University of
Tübingen, Germany and for a time was a professor of literature at
the University of Geneva. He is the author of some sixteen books in
hermeneutics, linguistics, and literary theory, as well as being an
expert on Schelling and Schleiermacher. He was the first to
establish a real dialogue between French post-structuralism and
German hermeneutics and critical theory, and is widely regarded as
the most significant philosopher in Germany in the generation
following Jürgen Habermas.
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