Juergen Boos: Habermas’ refusal of Zayed Book Award is a wrong decision

CAIRO – 4 May 2021: Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, described his German compatriot Jürgen Habermas’ refusal to accept the Sheikh Zayed Book Award after being chosen as the Cultural Personality of the Year as a wrong decision and a wasted opportunity.

The director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Juergen Boos, said, according to reports by WM24, citing the German Der Spiegel, that the German writer and philosopher missed a special opportunity that would have made his works and opinions more widespread in the Arab world, and would have shed light on his writings in the Arab community.

Born in 1929, Jürgen Habermas is considered the pioneer of critical, philosophical and political discourse. The Stanford Philosophical Circle described him as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. He also emerged in Germany as a general thinker who discusses important and fundamental issues in German newspapers.

The German philosopher, Habermas, belongs to the Frankfurt Critical School. It is a school of social theory and critical philosophy founded by a number of thinkers including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse between the first and second world wars.

Habermas is considered to be among the second generation of this school, which is based on Freudianism, Hegelianism and Marxism.