Habermas, Rawls, and the exclusionary practical reason of secularism

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the problem pluralism poses to regulating discourse in the public sphere, and primarily handles the political constructivist systems presented by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls in their discourse ethics and political liberalism, respectively. The focus of my attention will be on the limits that each of these thinkers places on public discourse through a re-hashing and redefining of practical reason. These contingent conceptions of practical reason claim universality justified pragmatically, a justification made necessary by the shedding of the credibility of transcendent posits post Kant. Habermas presents a context-transcendent determination of the types of reasons that can claim validity in the public sphere, while Rawls presents a conception of the public identity of a citizen as comprising a reasonable-rational cooperation specifying determinate content. My main project, as is evident from the title of this work, will be an attempt to both critique the productivity of placing these limits on practical reason given the aims both Habermas and Rawls are attempting to ratify, utilizing both Foucauldian and Nietzschian critiques of the systems they describe as most conducive to harmonious discourse.