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Jürgen Habermas was born in Düsseldorf in 1929 and grew up in Gummersbach, some 50 km west of Cologne. From 1949 to 1954 he studied at the universities of Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn, in the last of which he gained a doctorate in 1954 for a thesis on Schelling’s philosophy of history. In 1956 he became the Assistent to T.W. Adorno in the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, and began to prepare his Habilitation, the additional doctoral thesis needed for a university post. Opposition from within the institute led to his removal to Marburg where, in 1962, he completed his Habilitation under the openly left-wing Wolfgang Abendroth on the subject of ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.’ A post as professor of philosophy in Heidelberg preceded Habermas’ return to Frankfurt in 1964, where he succeeded Max Horkheimer as professor of philosophy, and where he remained until 1971. This period not only saw the publication of Theory and Practice (1963) and Knowledge and Human Interest (1968), it was also the period of student protest in German universities, protest led by some of Habermas’ students. While sympathizing with the protesters’ aims, Habermas was deeply disturbed by what he saw as a desire on the part of some protesters to attain their aims without proper conceptualization or discussion. From 1971 to 1983 Habermas was director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, and it was during this period that he published Theory of Communicative Action (1982), which marked a paradigm shift in his work from a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of language. He returned to Frankfurt in 1983, where be taught until his retirement.