Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition - Part 6 - Habermas' Critical Theory

This is the official YouTube channel of Dr. Michael Sugrue.

Please consider subscribing to be notified of future videos, as we upload Dr. Sugrue's vast archive of lectures.

Dr. Michael Sugrue earned his BA at the University of Chicago and PhD at Columbia University.

[glassjaw]

Man, these lectures make me happy. After work, with a glass of wine. No better way to spend an evening. Dr. Sugrue is one of the rare intellectuals that is personable and can break complex things down in a simple way that anyone can understand. 👏🏻

[mellownuance]

Mr Sugrue, I’m forever indebted to your lectures, what a delivery, what eloquence, what articulation, with my engineering background you make this subject more interesting than anything I have studied before, thank you Sir!

[thattimestampguy]

2:02 Science-Ethics
3:01 Psychoanalysis, Hegelian Philosophy, Linguistic Philosophy 3:31 Status of Knowledge & Society
4:10 _Legitmation Crisis_
6:19 Crisis: Organic system reaches an impasse

6:39 3 Parts
1. Politics, The State
Steering Economics
2. Economy, The Market
Taxes to Politics
9:04 3. Cultivation, Socio-Cultural

10:29 3 Systems, 1 Whole
All Advanced Capitalist Societies have these

11:20 What’s the problem causing the sickness? How can we prevent further struggles?

13:44
1960s hippies
Rejected Social Norms, a socio-cultural issue
Socio-cultural—> economic problem

18:40 Legitimation Crisis are important, Generational

*Creating Society*
19:33 All societies have Order Force, Coercion, Legitimization
What makes a society legitimate?
• Powerful strength
• Rational mind
(• Wholesome heart)

23:34 Serve the Interests of
• The Whole?
- A Few? Elites?
• Human Good

27:47 Ideal-Speech
• approximating it
28:50 what do I say?
Deformed opinions due to need to get along
Teleological critique of reason
32:01

33:02 *Critical Legal Studies* at Harvard Law
Law backed up by Force
Who benefits here?
Minority/small fraction benefit is
Reason over Fighting
“What sense does that make?”
No sense - Illegitimate, get rid of it
No nonsense, No Biased Benefits

39:09 ….
Politics, Economics, Socio-Cultural
Logos Uburolous
This is not Hume or Kant
41:24 Towards a collective humanity treatment

Kant - Ought
Habermas- Human Conscious, Serious Moral Discourse

[andrewbacon]

These lectures are providing me with such wisdom, I feel paralyzed with what to do with it. I want to tell all those I love to listen to this theory, but I fear that so few would understand the awesome irony of the long arc of history we all find ourselves in. God bless YouTube. I await the Philosopher King (Tyrant).

[nightoftheworld]

24:10 *Habermas’ skeleton key* “What Habermas is doing here is liberating us from moral skepticism based upon an attempt to universalize our rational needs, our rational desires. And our rational desires are the universally generalizable desires.”

[st]

This version of the Great Minds was so good.

[michaelthomheadley]

One of my favorite thinkers of all time. In what ways were you coerced by society today?

[sytzekamphuis]

I find that I run into the same problem here that I did with Kant's effort to get past Hume's Guillotine: the 'oughts' are simply implied at the beginning rather than worked towards from descriptive statements. Taking the description of Critical Legal Theory for example, the outcome of the examination would look very different depending on whether you feel that laws should benefit every member of society equally, should benefit society as a whole (i.e. aggregate benefits), should benefit at least some as long as none are disadvantaged (i.e. Pareto Parity). I get the feeling that, while this could be a useful tool, it still doesn't get us past the instrumental view of rationality and relies quite heavily on consensus as the legitimising factor for normative judgements.

[kehindeonakunle]

Great, brilliant exposition. I am further educated, enlightened

[obe]

Thank you, just dashed accidentally to your platform and am glad I did

Thank you prof

[DanettaClark]

Thank you I appreciate you for posting this

[biasedcriticism]

I find myself quite interested in his work, and I’m grateful for this general summary. I find myself more and more agreeing with Habbermas especially his concept of constitutional patriotism.

[Dan-xtsv]

I wonder if the developments of Critical Legal Theory in the 30 or so years since this lecture have changed Dr. Sugrue’s assessment of Habermas as the ‘least dogmatic’ Frankfurt School thinker.

[springinfialta]

I wonder if Habermas is happy with the current situation where some dissenting voices are censored. Would he believe that this is bad because not everyone is allowed to participate in the discussion on coercion and legitimacy, or would he believe this is good because the dissenting voices that are being censored have been so distorted by their prior religious and political prejudices that their contribution to the discussion would be a negative one?

[Julianguarin]

Hi, thank you so much for uploading. Do you have the rest of the lectures?

[benjaminblevins]

Insanity is not the loss of reason, it’s the loss of everything else.

[samuwhite]

where was the round of applause at the end?

[sofia.eris.bauhaus]

was that colored hair example Habermas' or yours? sound a lot like Adorno's take on jazz to me 😅.

[davidfost]

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

[annakh]

I'm hearing the philosophy of Habermas about legitimized coercion and genuinely wonder whether his statement "Principles of solidarity" on Israel's onslaught on Gaza qualifies as a striking example of a none legitimized one. Moreover, I question the universality of Kantian ethics in the form of categorical imperative by the selective application.
Habermas is basically ignoring the ongoing genocide of people in Gaza "in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi" which is heteronyms, irrational and utterly not legitimized form of coercion of thinking.
It's a truly remarkable lecture by the brilliant My Sugrue (R.I.P) but the hypocrisy of Habermas is a stain which I'm not able to overlook.