Knowledge and Human Interests

Introduction

Habermas published the book in 1968, developing the programme of his Frankfurt inaugural lecture of 1965 under the same title. He reconstructs the “prehistory of positivism” from Kant and Hegel through Marx, Comte and Mach to Peirce, Dilthey and Freud, arguing that theory of knowledge has turned into a mere philosophy of science that no longer asks about its own conditions. Psychoanalysis serves as his model of a science guided by an interest in emancipation: through self-reflection, patients free themselves from distorted communication. In a postscript of 1973 he answered critics, and he later shifted his approach towards a theory of communicative action.

Connections

Builds on

• How to Make Our Ideas Clear1878 · Charles Sanders Peirce
• Introduction to the Human Sciences1883 · Wilhelm Dilthey
• The Interpretation of Dreams1900 · Sigmund Freud

More works by Jürgen Habermas

• 1962The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• 1981The Theory of Communicative Action
• 1985The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity