Philosophical controversies within contemporary critical theoryarise largely from questions about the nature, scope and limits ofhuman reason. As the linguistic turn in twentieth-centuryphilosophy has increasingly given way to a sociocritical turn,traditional ideas of 'pure' reason have been left further andfurther behind. There is however considerable disagreement aboutwhat that shift entails for enlightenment ideals ofself-consciousness, self-determination, and self-realization. In this book two prominent philosophers bring thesedisagreements into focus around a set of familiar philosophicalissues concerning reason and the rational subject, truth andrepresentation, knowledge and objectivity, identity and difference,relativism and universalism, the right and the good. But these"perennial problems" are resituated within the context of criticaltheory as it has developed from the work of the Frankfurt School inthe 1930's and 1940's to the multiplicity of contemporaryapproaches: genealogical, hermeneutic, neopragmatist,deconstructive, and reconstructive.