For over forty years Habermas has taken inspiration from and been deeply influenced by the classical American pragmatists, especially Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. He has appropriated, reconstructed, and integrated many of the primary themes of these thinkers into his own comprehensive philosophic perspective: a radical critique of Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness; a focus on the primacy of social practices and action in understanding everyday life (the lifeworld); a thoroughgoing fallibilism that encompasses both knowledge of the world and moral reasoning; a development of an intersubjective dialogical understanding of action and rationality;