Maeve Cooke is Associate Professor of German Social and Political Thought at University College Dublin. She is the author of Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas's Pragmatics (MIT Press, 1994) and editor of On the Pragmatics of Communication (MIT Press, 1998), a collection of essays by Jürgen Habermas.

Thomas McCarthy is John Schaffer Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University and the editor of the MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.