The back of the book says this series is "a reference work for students and non-specialists." Don't you believe it.

I've read a lot of philosophy, but even I had a hard time getting through this book, and I didn't learn much about Habermas. I do not accept the justification that complex philosophical matters require bad writing. Prose loaded with twenty-cent words and pompous jargon is not only a poor start for the struggling student, but an unwitting comment on the writer's capacity for the kind of pompous intellectualizing that drives students and seekers OUT of philosophy.

With the exception of essayists Nancy Love and Simone Chambers, most of the contributors to this troublesome tome need to go back to Strunk and White, William Zinsser, and basic English composition to learn how NOT to write sentences like this one:

"The insight of the metacritique of pure reason is that the comprehensiveness of a system of reason cannot be predicated on comprehensiveness itself, and that a certain amount of incomprehensibility is necessary to make 'systematic' or 'complete comprehension' possible."

Setting aside the question of how many times can we work "compre-" into an incomprehensible phrasing, in plain English it means--I think--that a thought system's clarity doesn't guarantee the scope of its applicability. Why the hell not say so, and in a way that doesn't unconsciously make an irony of itself?

One expects this sort of thing in a journal, but for beginners it's useless and discouraging.