Rowman & Littlefield Publishers The Limits of Scientific Reason: Habermas, Foucault, and Science as a Social Institution (Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia)

Critically and comprehensively examining the works of Habermas and Foucault, two giants of 20th century continental philosophy, this book illuminates the effects of scientific reason as it migrates from its specialized institutions into society. It explores how science permeates shared human consciousness, to produce effects that ripple through the entire social body to restructure relations between persons, discourses, institutions, and power in ways which we are barely conscious of. The book shows how science, through its entwinement with power, discourses, and practices, presents certain social arrangements as natural and certain courses of action as beyond question. By arguing for a non-reductive, liberal scientific naturalism that sees science as one form of rationality amongst others, it opens possibilities for thought and action beyond scientific knowledge. Examining the shifting relations between science and other social institutions, discourses and power, the book addresses the narrowing of freedom by the instrumental modes of thinking that accompany scientific and technological change. McIntyre simultaneously raises the question of the good life and the question of a philosophical critique both directed towards science and, at the same time, shaped by, and responsive to it. By analysing the works of Foucault and Habermas in terms of their social, political, and historical contexts it reveals the two thinkers as linked by a commitment to the Enlightenment tradition and its emancipatory telos. The significant differences between the two are seen to result from Foucault's radicalization of this tradition, a radicalization which is, at the same time, implicit within the Enlightenment project itself. Review In this well-written and tightly argued work, John McIntyre takes a fresh look at the work of two major intellectuals who, half a century ago, brought into question common assumptions about the nature of science and the role it plays in society. The powerful and often conflicting writings of Jürgen Habermas and Michael Foucault questioned the detachment of the sciences from the play of political forces structuring social life, revealing the different ways in which the perspectives of scientist as observer of and participant in life can be entwined. This is a particularly relevant contribution to the debate about the authority of science at a time in which crudely irrational forms of scientific scepticism are often met with renewed forms of the type of obfuscating scientism earlier critiqued by both Habermas and Foucault.--Paul Redding, Emeritus Professor of philosophy, The University of Sydney John McIntyre's book is a high-quality analysis of two of the great contemporary philosophers: Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault who have had a world wide impact in Europe, the US, Asia and Australia. McIntyre takes contemporary science as the focus for his comparative analysis, a not often discussed aspect of their work. There are also very few commentators who have discussed these thinkers against the lens of their origins in their native traditions. Each thinker has their own partisan defenders with savage critiques of the other. Unlike them, McIntyre brings these two very different traditions and personalities into comparative dialogue around the key features of their work and contemporary science. In many ways this book is a textbook of the history of philosophy turning from the 20th century history into the early decades of the 21st, focusing on the self-understanding of modern science. Only a handful of modern philosophers have aspired to create a global understanding of both the evolution of modern society and its philosophical self-reflection and in this regard, McIntyre has selected two of the truly great thinkers. Throughout McIntyre's eight chapters the reader follows the breadth and depth of the evolution of their works and is treated to a careful critique and dissection of some of the major