ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Dieter Henrich's philosophy and the return to subjectivity as one of its key aspects pose a serious challenge to Jürgen Habermas's postmetaphysical conception of communicative rationality. It shows that the return to subjectivity must include an investigation into the normative role of perceptual experience in the sense that the validity of empirical truth claims actually depends on a pre-conceptual but epistemically relevant basis in the subject's sensory experience. The chapter claims that the notion of communicative rationality as it has been developed within Habermas's Critical Theory, and which also forms the basis of one of the most widely debated contemporary moral theories, that is discourse ethics, constitutes an unnecessary and ultimately unacceptable curtailment of a concept of human reason that can still be defended today. A closely related question that must be raised in this context is how subject-centered a more encompassing concep.
