Knowledge and Human Interests

Habermas describes Knowledge and Human Interests as anattempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism with theintention of analysing the connections between knowledge and humaninterests. Convinced of the increasing historical and socialimportance of the natural and behavioural sciences, Habermas makesclear how crucial it is to understand the central meanings andjustifications of these sciences. He argues that for too long therelationship between philosophy and science has been distorted. In this extraordinarily wide-ranging book, Habermas examines theprincipal positions of modern philosophy - Kantianism, Marxism,positivism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, the philosophy of science,linguistic philosophy and phenomenology - to lay bare the structureof the processes of enquiry that determine the meaning and thevalidity of all our statements which claim objectivity. This edition contains a postscript written by Habermas for thesecond German edition of Knowledge and Human Interests.