Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity

Devoted to the most important American Continental philosopher of his generation and one of the discipline's founding fathers, and featuring some of the field's
most distinguished luminaries, this collection is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. Taking up themes central to Schrag's own philosophical concerns, these essays refer throughout to his salient "interventions" in the dialogue of late-twentieth-century thought characterized as "postmodernity." The authors address, implicitly or directly, the question of philosophy's role and responsibility, or "task."

The volume begins with an overview of this task and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's most significant and original philosophical achievements: transversal rationality, the self after post-modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communication praxis. Following and expanding on the implications of these themes, the authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self's connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion's disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language. The book also contains Schrag's responses to many of the works in the collection.

MARTIN BECK MATUŠTIK is a professor of philosophy at Purdue University. He is the author of several books, including Jürgen Habermas: A Political-Philosophical Profile, Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World Order, and Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel.


WILLIAM L. McBRIDE is the Arthur G. Hansen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is the author of numerous books, including From Yugoslav Praxis to Global Pathos: Anti-Hegemonic Post-Post-Marxist Essays, Philosophical Reflections on the Changes in Eastern Europe, and Social and Political Philosophy.