By Charles Andrews
Jürgen Habermas, the celebrated philosopher and “defender of humane Enlightenment values,” as the Guardian newspaper called him, died this month.
Among the flood of eulogies, one Alex Karp published a reminiscence of Habermas, under whom Karp studied in his late twenties. Karp praises Habermas because he “unsparingly derided ‘idiots’ and ‘half-idiots’ on either the right or the left” for their “inconsistent thought and a lack of intellectual rigor.” Karp’s look back consists mostly of anecdotes like this one:
