Contributor Avatar
Martin Beck Matustik
Contributor
BIOGRAPHY

Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Religion, Arizona State University, Phoenix. Author of Jurgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile and others.

Primary Contributions (1)
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is the most important German philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. A highly influential social and political thinker, Habermas was generally identified with the critical social theory developed from the 1920s by the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main,…
READ MORE
Publications (3)
Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel
Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (February 2013)
By Martin Beck Matustik
The Second Edition, new Preface 2013.  Contradictory interpretations have been applied to history-making events that led to the end of the Cold War: Václav Havel, using Kierkegaardian terms, called the demise of totalitarianism in East-Central Europe an "existential revolution" (i.e. an awakening of human responsibility, spirit, and reason), while others hailed it as a victory for the "New World Order." Regardless of one's point of view, however, it is clear that the global landscape has been dramatically...
READ MORE
Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations (Philosophy of Religion)
Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations (Philosophy of Religion) (April 2008)
By Martin Beck Matustik
No one will deny that we live in a world where evil exists. But how are we to come to grips with human atrocity and its diabolical intensity? Martin Beck Matuštík considers evil to be even more radically evil than previously thought and to have become all too familiar in everyday life. While we can name various moral wrongs and specific cruelties, Matuštík maintains that radical evil understood as a religious phenomenon requires a religious response where the language of hope, forgiveness, redemption,...
READ MORE
Jurgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (20th Century Political Thinkers)
Jurgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile (20th Century Political Thinkers) (June 2001)
By Martin Beck Matustik
This philosophical-political profile offers the first of its kind intellectual reconstruction of HabermasOs defining existential and historical situations, his generational profile and interventions, his impact on as well as the discontents that his life work generates in others. Written as a lively dramatic engagement with major themes of HabermasOs adult life in postwar Germany, the entire study occupies a unique place between the standard genres of a biography and a theoretical commentary on the...
READ MORE