A nice review of Mathew Specter's Habermas: An Intellectual Biography HERE.
As an undergraduate I was obsessed with the Frankfurt School, taking several fantastic classes with Douglas Kellner (who was in the University of Texas phil. dept. then) and economist Harry Cleaver. It was a great exposure to rigorous systematic philosophy. I really vividly remember devouring Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity as well as Thomas McCarthy's great publications on Habermas.
In graduate school I tried to read some more Habarmas, but didn't really have time given the other stuff I was learning. I remember also being extraordinarily put off by his one-sentence dismissal of the whole of Paul Grice's work as being "solipstic" (and I still think one can read the conversational maxims in Grice's work on implicature in the transcendental manner that the Habermasian needs; I also think the resulting view is a good way for a deontologist to respond to the particularist by explaining how the strong defeasibility of moral laws is no evidence against their normative bindingness; If I remember right, at an APA I saw Margaret Little give an astoundingly good lecture in response to Jonathan Dancy that suggested something along these lines).
Anyhow, the biography does look like a good way to painlessly catch up on one of the last century's most important philosophers, though I think if I ever get to go back to the Frankfurt School it's actually going to be Adorno to whom I dedicate the most time.
One more thing, I don't know if people remember the period when Habermas was going to be the great bridge between analytic and continental philosophy. Somewhere on-line there's a moving interview with Kellner where he kind of mourns what he sees as the lost opportunity of that time. I don't know. . . I feel like the most rancorous aspects of the division are now fading. A lot of gen ex philosophers view the whole set of brouhahas as kind of a weird Baby Boomer thing we don't really understand (maybe along the lines of voting for Ronald Reagan or liking the movie The Big Chill). This is almost certainly radically unfair to both philosophers and moviegoers, but that doesn't mean it's not still a sign of something like progress.
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