Jürgen Habermas, (born June 18, 1929, Düsseldorf, Germany).
He attended the Universities of Bonn, Göttingen, and Zürich. At Bonn he received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1954 with a dissertation on Friedrich Schelling. From 1956 to 1959 he worked as Theodor Adorno’s first assistant at the Institute for Social Research. Habermas left the institute in 1959 and completed his second doctorate (his habilitation thesis, which qualified him to teach at the university level) in 1961 under the political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth at the University of Marburg; it was published with additions in 1962 as Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). In 1961 Habermas became a privatdozent (unsalaried professor and lecturer) in Marburg, and in 1962 he was named extraordinary professor (professor without chair) at the University of Heidelberg. He succeeded Max Horkheimer as professor of philosophy and sociology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt University) in 1964. After 10 years as director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg (1971–81), he returned to Frankfurt, where he retired in 1994. Thereafter he taught in the United States at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) and New York University and lectured worldwide.
Habermas was the recipient of numerous honours, including the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1980), the Kyoto Prize (2004), the Erasmus Prize (2013), and the John W. Kluge Prize (2015).
