How Jürgen Habermas helped me cope with my wife’s death

Jürgen Habermas. ‘I was only tangentially aware of his work, but the argument you have distilled is inspiring,’ says Neil Blackshaw. Photograph: Action Press/Shutterstock

Compliments to Stuart Jeffries for his obituary of Jürgen Habermas (15 March). Jeffries does a superb job describing both the personal and intellectual dimensions of Habermas, his life, thinking and commitment to action.

For this layman, who has darted in and out of Habermas, most influential was his concept of bounded, intermediate, public settings engendering meaningful thought and action. I never looked at the role of the 19th-century coffee house in the same way.