ABSTRACT
Underlying Habermas's Dilthey reception during the 1960s was a scholarly context as well as a political context. By emphasizing the specificity and irreducibility of Verstehen, Habermas believed that hermeneutics could be enlisted in the methodological struggle against scientism, which had sought to extend its instrumental attitude toward physical nature to the domain of human social action. One of Habermas's primary goals in Theory of Communicative Action is to redress the question of the absent normative foundations of the Frankfurt School. Habermas, for his part, has shown himself to be extremely uncomfortable with the idea of timeless, unconditional claims to validity, which he views as a lapse into foundationalism. Although Habermas has invoked the idea of the axial age in his later writings on the philosophy of religion, and he has, somewhat surprisingly, refrained from indicating what role it might play a role in reformulating the idea of the lifeworld he develops in Theory of Communicative Action.
