Abstract
This chapter studies Habermas’s modernist doctrines of truth, justice, and the internal relationship among truth, justice, and human reason. First, it examines Habermas’s concept of truth: from the early discursive concept to the present Kantian-pragmatic concept. Second, taking the Habermas-Rawls debate in 1990s as its paradigm of illustration, it examines Habermas’s concept of the reasonableness of a political concept of justice, and his view on the inseparability of truth, justice, and reason. Third, it examines Habermas’s concept of the ideal speech situation as the mechanism for the establishment of a political concept of justice that is reasonable. Fourth, it examines Habermas’s view on the role of overlapping consensus in establishing a political concept of justice that is reasonable. It thus demonstrates Habermas’s modernist sentiment in which truth, justice and reason are inseparable; there can no justice without the rule of reason; there can be no the rule of reason without truth.
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Chen, X. (2021). Truth and Justice. In: The Essentials of Habermas. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79794-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79794-2_4
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