Towards Reconciling Two Heroes: Habermas and Hegel

Abstract I describe my engagement with Habermas's ideas, and sketch a way of reading of Hegel that I take to be consonant with the deepest lessons I have learned from Habermas. I read Hegel as having a social, linguistic theory of normativity, and an exclusively retrospective conception of progress and the sense in which history exhibits teleological normativity. Keywords: Habermas, Hegel, normativity, discourse ethics, history. Part One I first heard Jürgen Habermas's name more than 30 years ago, in the Spring of 1979, when I had just arrived at the University of Pittsburgh as a new Assistant Professor. Those who know my Doktorvater Richard Rorty will not be surprised to hear that, although his own masterpiece Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature had just appeared, rather than talking about that, at the time he was much more interested in passing on his enthusiasm for Habermas's book Knowledge and Human Interests. Following his recommendation, I read that work-with mounting excitement. It did wonderful, original things with lines of thought I had always been interested in, but had never seen how to integrate with my central interest in the nature of language and its role in our lives. It was able to do so in part by offering a reading of huge swathes of the philosophical tradition since Kant. The ambition and sheer power of the work exhilarated and inspired me then-as they still do today. More than anything else, I think it was the invigorating prospect of a new way of thinking about how philosophy of language could legitimately be thought of as "first philosophy" that caught my imagination. The familiar starting-point is the conviction that the most important event in human history-simply the biggest thing that ever happened to us (or, alternatively, that we ever did)-is the rolling and still on-going transition from traditional to modern societies, practices, and modes of thought. (If someone wants to hold out instead for the antecedent advent of civilization-large-scale cities, organized agriculture, the accompanying specialization and division of labor

Asserting

In this paper, written more than ten years before Making it Explicit, I take a close look at the pivotal role which assertions play in human interactions. Tending a bridge from the Kantian theory of judgements to Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy, with the Fregean notion of conceptual content providing the pillars, and relying on the teachings drawn from the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy as keystones, I begin by questioning the dominant view of representationalism in analytical philosophy after Russell, Carnap and Tarski. It is here that I begin weaving the conceptual network that will eventually blossom into the program of pragmatic rationalism with logical inferentialism and semantic expressivism as pivotal notions, manifest in our game of asking for and giving reasons. It is for these reasons that I agree that a bilingual version of this early piece seems a good starting point for the reflections on what unites and what divides la philosophical visions of Wittgenstein and my own

Multi-messenger searches via IceCube’s high-energy neutrinos and gravitational-wave detections of LIGO/Virgo

We summarize initial results for high-energy neutrino counterpart searches coinciding with gravitational-wave events in LIGO/Virgo\u27s GWTC-2 catalog using IceCube\u27s neutrino triggers. We did not find any statistically significant high-energy neutrino counterpart and derived upper limits on the time-integrated neutrino emission on Earth as well as the isotropic equivalent energy emitted in high-energy neutrinos for each event

Measuring the Neutrino Cross Section Using 8 years of Upgoing Muon Neutrinos Observed with IceCube

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory detects neutrinos at energies orders of magnitude higher than those available to current accelerators. Above 40 TeV, neutrinos traveling through the Earth will be absorbed as they interact via charged current interactions with nuclei, creating a deficit of Earth-crossing neutrinos detected at IceCube. The previous published results showed the cross section to be consistent with Standard Model predictions for 1 year of IceCube data. We present a new analysis that uses 8 years of IceCube data to fit the ν$_{μ}$ absorption in the Earth, with statistics an order of magnitude better than previous analyses, and with an improved treatment of systematic uncertainties. It will measure the cross section in three energy bins that span the range 1 TeV to 100 PeV. We will present Monte Carlo studies that demonstrate its sensitivity