From Communicative Action To The Face Of The Other

Although the continental philosophers Jurgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas are both inescapably important to an array of debates in contemporary moral theory, they are rarely assessed in relation to each other. Steven Hendley's study is based on the conviction that beneath the surface there is in fact a remarkable degree of convergence in the two philosophers' work that is usually overlooked. Hendley discovers and explains the complementarity of Levinas's conception of discourse in relation to the Other to Habermas's theory of communication as the basis for recognition of universal moral norms.