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If the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact.

Jurgen Habermas

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Jurgen Habermas
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: June 18
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Dusseldorf
Jurgen Habermas
Habermas
Impact
Supposed
Events
Constitute
Stand
September
History
Comparison
Able
Attack
Must
Terror
World
Historical

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Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too.
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The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future ... The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured.
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Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public.
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Today's Islamic fundamentalism is also a cover for political motifs. We should not overlook the political motifs we encounter in forms of religious fanaticism
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All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects that [the norm's] general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests, and the consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation.
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I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.
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Partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists
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The scenarios of biological or chemical warfare painted in detail by the American media during the months after September 11...only betray the inability of the government to determine the magnitude of the danger.
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Historically, terrorism falls in a category different from crimes that concern a criminal court judge.
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After September 11, the European governments have completely failed. They are incapable of seeing beyond their own national scope of interests.
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Since the intervention in Afghanistan, we suddenly began to notice when, in political discussions, we found ourselves only among Europeans or Israelis.
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I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act
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Science can only be comprehended epistemologically, which means as one category of possible knowledge, as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research.
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Instead of the international police action we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, there are wars again - conducted with state-of-the-art technology, but still in the old style
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[Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.
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I take as my fundamental starting point the fundamental distinction between work and interaction
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Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.
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Each murder is one too many.
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Perhaps at a later point important developments will be traced back to September 11. But for now we do not know which of the many scenarios will actually hold in the future.
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Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.
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