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Reviewed by:
  • An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age
  • Michael P. Kramer (bio)
Jürgen Habermas, Michael Reder, Josef Schmidt, Norbert Briskorn, and Friedo Ricken , An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 87 pp.

The philosophical champion of communicative rationality and the secular public sphere once again engages both religion (as a social formation) and faith (as a way of knowing) with welcome intensity and seriousness, this time in what began as a "podium discussion" in 2007 with members of the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. Habermas finds significance in the Axial Age origins of both philosophy and religion and castigates "the blinkered enlightenment" for being "unenlightened about itself." At the same time, he challenges "the religious side" to "accept the authority of 'natural' reason,' " albeit fallible, "and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality." In their responses, his able interlocutors are appreciative but skeptical. In the end, the value of this slim but suggestive volume (like Habermas's earlier published conversation with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) lies as much in what it does—bringing the voices of reason and faith together in respectful debate—as in what it says. If not more so. [End Page 538]

Michael P. Kramer

Michael Chase, the English translator of Pierre Hadot's books, is a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. He has also published French and English translations of classical Greek texts, notably Simplicius's commentary on Aristotle's Categories, and is currently preparing a translation of Isabelle Stengers's book Thinking with Whitehead.

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