RIP Habermas (1929-2026)

I was sad to hear the news that one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century passed away- the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. His passing elicited in me some thoughts about how the intellectual culture which helped create, and celebrate, such an innovative, ambitious thinker has changed.  I wrote my thoughts out below for this blog post.

I first encountered the work of Habermas while an MA student back in the mid 1990s.  I never took a university course that covered, in any depth, the work of Habermas.  His name would come up in different classes, and then one of my graduate supervisors suggested he might be someone I wanted to engage with given the embryonic ideas I was developing for my MA thesis.  That project involved defending free speech from a commitment to the pragmatics of dialogue.  Habermas's Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action had just been published in English a few years earlier.  

As I read through that book I felt like the universe had delivered Habermas to me at precisely that time to provide me with the theoretical commitments I needed to develop and defend my MA thesis!  The academic year of 1995/1996, a year devoted primarily to researching and writing my MA thesis, was so critical to my intellectual development.  

When I proposed my potential PhD thesis the following year I initially intended to explore Habermas for it.  In the summer after my MA thesis I enrolled in an introduction to German language course but dropped out as I found it too difficult.  In my first year of the PhD program I had proposed the faculty and students in our reading group read through Habermas's new book Between Facts and Norms, which had just been published that year.

However, that book proved a very challenging read.  And that same year I began to learn about John Rawls, and the exchange between Rawls and Habermas in the Journal of Philosophy.  I found Rawls's social contract theory a bit easier to comprehend and engage with.  But Habermas was the thinker that lead me to Rawls (for many it was the other way around), and I think that played a substantive part in my eventual departure from the Rawlsian project. 

For many years my research then developed in ways that had minimal contact or engagement with that of Habermas.  But my path crossed his again when he published The Future of Human Nature in the early 2000s.  

By that time I had already devoted most of my post-PhD research to studying and writing about the impact of the genetic revolution.  This was a bit of an intellectual risk for me, as it was not (and still isn't) a topic of interest to most political theorists.  But having a heavy-weight like Habermas engage with these topics, even if I disagreed with much of what he argued, was a major source of both inspiration and reassurance that these were important issues that political theorists should address. 

Habermas was my first intellectual "crush", and in many ways I consider him one of my "intellectual grandfathers".  As a 25 year old grad student reading Habermas's research on discourse ethics was one of the most transformative experiences of my intellectual life.  Which leads me to some broader reflections on how things have changed in academia and society more generally, over the past few decades.  

I see Habermas as a figure who represents the last of an intellectual era in two important respects.  Firstly, he was a creative and ambitious thinker who wrote great works of philosophy that spoke to a large audience.  The professional norms that came to dominant the field by the 1990s, with the proliferation of publication venues, department rankings, sub-field specializations, etc.  incentivized the inward specialization which, in my opinion, narrowed (rather than expanded) the intellectual interests and problem-solving tool-kit of philosophy.  Habermas's work pre-dated that era, which I think is a main reason why his work will remain a work "for the ages". 

Habermas is also the last of the tradition of public intellectuals who were relevantly well known for the ideas he published in scholarly works covering decades of research versus tweets or social media posts.  The latter has also, in my opinion, had a corrosive impact on the field.  Habermas would have never developed his creative ideas had he been preoccupied with reducing his communication to the size of a "tweet" and being preoccupied only with the problems dominating the news/ social media of his day.  

When I think about the reasons I am so saddened by the news of Habermas's passing, my feelings extend beyond the loss of just him as one intellectual and scholar.  I am sad for the passing of the culture and time that made someone like Habermas possible in the first place.  That is not to say it is not possible for an intellectual giant on par with him to emerge today.  But I do believe the changes in the norms and practices of academia, as well as technology and society, have altered the intellectual landscape in significant ways.  Making it unlikely that someone with Habermas-like potential could spend many decades developing and refining such creative and ambitious ideas.  

The world of ideas was meaningfully impacted in a positive way by having had the good fortune to have enjoyed Habermas an active participate for so many decades.  Let his example inspire the public intellectuals and philosophers of tomorrow. 

Cheers, 

Colin 

Rule #31

Yesterday I came across this excellent 1997 essay by the sociologist Gary Marx.  Brilliant description of the moral imperatives of intellectual inquiry.

Cheers, 

Colin

Nature Commentary on AI

 

Nature has this excellent comment on AI I wanted to make a note of for future reference. A sample:

Intelligence, as we have seen, does not require strong autonomy — a finding that complicates debates about legal and moral responsibility of artificial-intelligence systems, which often assume the two go together. We need more careful, empirically grounded ways to assess and establish responsibility for AI. Furthermore, conventional methods of governance are unlikely to work for AGI, precisely because of its generality. Technology is typically governed on the basis of its possible uses, but AGI can be used almost anywhere.

Cheers, 

Colin

Apes Share Human Ability ot Imagine

So says the title of this news alert .  

Such research is of particular interest to me as I now revive a decade-old research project on play, which I had to put on the back shelf while working my book on aging (though it also is importantly linked to that theme as well).

Nature news has the scoop on this study as well.

And the paper in Science is here.  The abstract:

Secondary representations enable our minds to depart from the here-and-now and generate imaginary, hypothetical, or alternate possibilities that are decoupled from reality, supporting many of our richest cognitive capacities such as mental-state attribution, simulation of possible futures, and pretense. We present experimental evidence that a nonhuman primate can represent pretend objects. Kanzi, a lexigram-trained bonobo, correctly identified the location of pretend objects (e.g., “juice” poured between empty containers), in response to verbal prompts in scaffolded pretense interactions. Across three experiments, we conceptually replicated this finding and excluded key alternative explanations. Our findings suggest that the capacity to form secondary representations of pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an enculturated ape and likely dates back 6 to 9 million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors.

Cheers, 

Colin

Book cover

This labour of love, the product of 20 years of research, will be out later this year.  

The book will be freely accessible as an "open access" book, thanks to generous support from the endowment of my Sir Edward Peacock Research Professorship.  

As I noted in an earlier post, to complete this book I worked on it every single day in 2025, up until its completion in mid-December.  It consumed most of my waking hours. I am still trying to adjust back to normal life in the "post-writing" phase!  

The cover image captures the central frame deployed in the book concerning human aging and longevity science.  The steamship represents "public health" progressing up the Ocean of Longevity.  The waves represent the diseases which slow progress through the Ocean.  Off in the distance is the iceberg, responsible for the onslaught of the chronic diseases of late life, representing biological aging.  

On top of the iceberg is the shadowy figure of the creature from Shelley's novel Frankenstein.  Shelley's creature represents how the human imagination can conjure up unfounded societal harms from experimental science (especially translational gerontology).  The argumentation deployed in the book attempts to abate such thinking.  

The book cover also echoes Walden's travel through the Artic, as Frankenstein hunts down the creature.  It is the perfect image to capture the themes and message of the book.  

Finally, the positioning of the steamship makes the reader/viewer feel as if they are actually on the ship.  And we are!  It is the tale of the future in store for today's aging populations living in a warming and unequal world.           

Cheers, 

Colin

Start of Winter Term (2026) Intro Lecture (Part 1)

Now that my latest major research project is completed, I hope to return to doing some regular, more substantial, blog posting.  The following is my first of such posts, to kick off the year 2026. 

This week I began the winter teaching term with my introduction lecture to 250 students in my third year course on the history of political thought.  In each course I teach I always begin the first hour of the course with some general "framing" reflections, insights I hope will prime the societal significance of the educative mission and the course content we cover in the months to come.  

The primary goal of this introductory lecture is really two-fold.  Firstly, to motivate students to get excited about their own intellectual development -- by engaging their curiosity and encouraging them to reflect on why they should care to learn about anything.  And, secondly, to get them excited about learning the specific course content (e.g. historical political thinkers).  

To do the latter I have explain why learning about, and engaging with, the thinkers of the past is so important.  In this course, which is themed around the history of political thought, I argue that the thinkers of past were important "problem-solvers" that attempted to theorize about the problems of their day, whether that be the political inequality that concerned Rousseau's democratic sensibilities, Burke's worries about the appeals to the abstract political ideals of the French revolutionaries, the existence and persistence of patriarchy (for feminist thinkers) or racial inequality (Douglass, Du Bois), or the exploitation and alienation of capitalism (Marx).

Taking the time and care to explain the motivation for studying the subject matter of a course is, I believe, the first and most important task of any instructor.  If this is not done well, I believe it will create significant challenges for many students that could have been avoided.  Perhaps nothing else derails the educational experience more than course content being presented in a boring or unmotivated fashion.  If students' engagement with the course material is low from the start, it is almost impossible to engage later on.  What typically happens, for the average student, is it starts somewhat higher, and then diminishes as the term progresses and other assignments/classes command their time and attention.  But hopefully their interest stays high enough to successfully get them through the course material.  

I think it is easy for instructors to function with the false belief that most undergraduates are as passionate about the course material as they themselves are.  The reality is that few, if any, of our students would choose to spend their lifetime and career studying these topics.  But, at least for a few years of their early adulthood, there is a unique opportunity for an instructor to stoke a passion for learning this material.  And this could have a formative impact on their learning and intellectual development.  

Getting students interested in course content is critical because highly motivated students tend to do better, academically.  But articulating the motivation for seriously engaging in political theory takes some time and care and attention.  Unlike topics in international relations (e.g. war/conflict) or Canadian politics (pick any example from the dysfunction of the day), the more abstract nature of political theory (especially when the course covers thinkers who have been deceased for a long time (centuries or longer) means that many students struggle to appreciate what the point of the intellectual exercise is.  Why study the ideas of the dead?  

If an instructor just starts unpacking the ideas and ideals of past thinkers, without framing the function or societal importance of the intellectual exercise, I believe many students will flounder.  This is an issue I am so passionate about I decided to write a book about it, drawing on 20 years of experience teaching the canon of Western political thought.

For my intro lecture this week I added a few new insights and themes into that introductory lecture.  I summarize them here.

I began the lecture with the following quote from Dunn.

It is very easy to illustrate and reinforce the point that humans do not really know what they are doing.  If I were  to ask students to think of any public policy issue, be it from local, provincial, federal or global politics, that they believe is wrong-headed there would a very lengthy list.  The list of bad policy decisions or other shortcomings of the "status quo" of our political life is likely to be much longer than the list they would be able to conjure if I asked them for examples of exemplary policy decision-making and strengths of our current political culture and institutions (there of course are many things in this latter category, but our minds do not conjure them as easily as our list of complaints!).  

The fact that we lack the wisdom to act sagely, at least collectively as societies, is not only a truism, but it is also absurd.  Given how high the stakes are in governance- for the economy, for public health, planetary health, future generations, the health of our democracies and human welfare more generally, it is absurd that we continue to fall so short on some many things.  Why is this so?  Or, perhaps more accurately, why does it at least seem so?... 

The rest of this lengthy post will be updated next week. (update- teaching term was busy than I expected, if/when part 2 is written I will link back here)

Cheers, 

Colin

Happy Holiday Season!

 

Happy holiday season to all!

Cheers, 

Colin