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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

Jurgen Habermas

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Jurgen Habermas
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: June 18
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Dusseldorf
Jurgen Habermas
Habermas
Cannot
Understandable
Make
Monstrous
Would
September
Context
Manner
Crime
Imagine
Political
Comprehensible

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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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From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.
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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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The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a self-formative process, that is by the completion of self-reflection, and not in any unmistakable way by what the patient says or how he behaves.
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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.
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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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The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years' War.
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Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities.
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Historically, terrorism falls in a category different from crimes that concern a criminal court judge.
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The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country.
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The speaker must choose a comprehensible expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another.
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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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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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[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.
Jurgen Habermas
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I take as my fundamental starting point the fundamental distinction between work and interaction
Jurgen Habermas
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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.
Jurgen Habermas
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Partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists
Jurgen Habermas
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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.
Jurgen Habermas
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Each murder is one too many.
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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.
Jurgen Habermas