Admirable labor sipnóptica de Charles Taylor sobre la carrera filosófica de Jürgen Habermas. Inicia el artículo reconciendo el esfuerzo de Habermas de rescatar , en clara lucha contra el relativismo posmoderno y el cientificismo. Comenta Taylor el original giro que le da a la moral kantiana de máximas universalizables a una moral dialógica como función de la razón deliberativa, producto de la transformación que Habermas produce de nuestra idea de razón. Habermas se preocupa de rescatar a la razón del dominio científico y a la moral del arbitrio de las emociones y la subjetividad.Como sostiene Taylor, es merito de Habermas el apuntar más bien a la diversificación del proceder de la razón en diversas esferas que necesitan "dialogar" entre sí. Taylor a su vez destaca el hecho de que no contento con escribir, enseñar y discutir acerca de filosofía, Habermas ha tenido el coraje de intervenir en los debates más importantes de nuestro tiempo: el liberalismo político, la modernidad y la religión para poner algunos ejemplos. Esto debido a que en Habermas la teoría y la práctica están organicamente ligadas y el participar activamente en los debates es simplemente ser fiel a sí mismos.
Aquí la versión en Inglés del artículo de Charles Taylor:

Rethinking secularism:
The philosopher-citizen
posted by Charles Taylor
Jürgen Habermas is one of the most prominent philosophers on the global scene of the last half century. His work is of an impressive range and depth. It would be impossible to sum it up in a short essay, but I shall try to single out three facets of his extraordinary achievement which help throw light on his deserved fame and influence.

Jürgen Habermas is known in the world of analytic philosophy primarily as a moral and political philosopher. He has striven against a slide which has often seemed plausible and tempting for modern thinkers, that towards a certain relativism or subjectivism in morals. The difficulty of establishing firm ethical conclusions in the midst of vigorous debate among rival doctrines, particularly when these disputes are contrasted to those among natural scientists can all too easily push us to the conclusion that there is no fact of the matter here, that ethical doctrines are not a matter of knowledge, but only of emotional reaction or subjective projection, that the issues here are not cognitive.

Habermas from the very beginning set his face against these non-cognitivist views. There can be ethical knowledge. But he wished also to break with a long-hallowed notion of what this knowledge must consist in, that which we find in the traditions which go back to Plato and Aristotle. According to these, ethical knowledge has for its object human nature, or the nature of things. In other words, it is grounded in some normative picture of what humans are like, or else of their place in the universe. According to Habermas, it was the discredit of these “metaphysical” views which gave colour to non-cognitivism in the first place. In order to refute subjectivism, morality needs another kind of rational basis.