Social Science Research Council
Cristina Lafont is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. She specializes in German philosophy, particularly hermeneutics and critical theory. She has also published in the fields of philosophy of language and contemporary moral and political philosophy. She is author of The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy (MIT Press, 1999) and Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Democratic citizens cannot determine in advance of actual public deliberation the reasons upon which their political decisions ought to be based. In order to be legitimate, their decisions ought to be based on those reasons that have survived the scrutiny of political deliberation in the public sphere.
In his essay “Religion in the Public Sphere,” Habermas joins the debate between liberals and critics of liberalism on the proper role of religion in the public sphere. His proposal focuses on what each side of the debate gets right: the liberal emphasis on the obligation to provide nonreligious reasons in support of coercive policies with which all citizens must comply, on one side, and the critic’s insistence on the right of religious citizens to adopt their religious stance in public deliberation about such policies, on the other. [...]
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