Habermas died on Saturday in the Bavarian town of Starnberg, his publisher Suhrkamp Verlag said.
Widely regarded as a towering European public intellectual of the 20th century, his major works were developed in Frankfurt, where his career began in the 1950s at the Institute for Social Research under philosopher Theodor W Adorno.
Habermas was born in Dusseldorf on June 18, 1929 and studied philosophy, psychology, German literature and economics in Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn.
His political analysis helped shape Germany's post-war intellectual climate beginning with the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962.
The Theory of Communicative Action, which he published in 1981, is also considered a seminal work of philosophy.
Habermas' studies frequently examined the concept of the public sphere and explored the forms of discourse best suited to organising democratic societies.
Habermas was born with a cleft palate that required repeated operations as a child, an experience that helped inform his later thinking about language.
Habermas said he had experienced the importance of spoken language as "a layer of commonality without which we as individuals cannot exist" and recalled struggling to make himself understood.
He also spoke of the "superiority of the written word" and said that "the written form conceals the flaws of the oral".
with AP
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