ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some general remarks about one motivation for reading Heidegger as a pragmatist, a motivation that powerfully affects how reason gets characterized. It describes the specific issue: the different picture that emerges if one sees the necessary connection between reason and authenticity. The chapter focuses on the critical relation that obtains between authenticity and universality in an ontology of care. Heidegger agrees with pragmatism that the bearer of intentional content cannot be a Cartesian res cogitans: thinking and reasoning are grounded in the practical agency of Dasein, the being who is intentional. There might seem to be little room between pragmatist emphasis on the socially and historically contingent character of norms and rationalist emphasis on their claim to validity. Habermas, in contrast, holds that the decisionism that is an irreducible part of exemplary necessity plays no role in the practice of moral argumentation.
