Karl-Otto Apel

Karl-Otto Apel (born March 15, 1922 in Düsseldorf) is a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Apel worked in ethics, the philosophy of language and human sciences. He wrote extensively in these fields, publishing mostly in German. He influenced other philosophers writing in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Life

Apel served in the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. He then studied at the University of Bonn where he earned his Ph.D. in 1950.

Academic positions

Apel was appointed lecturer at the University of Mainz in 1961. He was a full professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel from 1962 to 1969, at the University of Saarbrücken from 1969 to 1972, and at the University of Frankfurt am Main from 1972 to 1990. In 1990 he transferred to emeritus status. He has held a number of visiting and guest professorships at universities around the world.

He was made a Member of the Academia Europaea in 1989 and a Full Member of the Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea in 1993. In 2001 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Philosophy

Apel's work brings together the Analytical and Continental philosophical traditions, especially pragmatism and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

In Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective, Apel reformulated the difference between understanding (Verstehen) and explanation (Erklärung), which originated in the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey and interpretive sociology of Max Weber, on the basis of a Peircean-inspired transcendental-pragmatic account of language. This account of the "lifeworld" would become an element of the theory of communicative action and discourse ethics, which Apel co-developed with Jürgen Habermas. While sympathetic to Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, Apel has been critical of aspects of Habermas's approach. Apel has proposed that a theory of communication should be grounded in the transcendental-pragmatic conditions of communication. After taking his point of departure from Apel, Habermas has moved towards a "weak transcendentalism" that is more closely tied to empirical social inquiry.

Apel has also written works on Charles Sanders Peirce and is a past president of the C.S. Peirce Society.

An early German-speaking adversary of so-called critical rationalism, Apel published a refutation of the philosophy of Karl Raimund Popper: In Transformation der Philosophie (1973), Apel charged Popper with being guilty of, amongst other things, a pragmatic contradiction.

List of Works

• Analytic Philosophy of Language and the Geisteswissenschaften (1967),
• Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (1971),
• Sprache, Brucke und Hindernis (1972),
• Dialog als Methode (1972),
• Transformation der philosophie: Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik (1973),
• Transformation der philosophie: Das Apriori der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft (1976),
• Sprachpragmatik und philosophie (1976),
• Neue Versuche uber Erklaren und Verstehen (1978),
• Die Erklaren: Verstehen-Kontroverse in Transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht (1979),
• Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (1980 & 1998),
• Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism (1981),
• Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective (1984),
• La communicazione umana (1985),
• Diskurs und Verantwortung: Das Problem des Ubergangs zur Postkonventionellen Moral (1988),
• Towards a Transcendental Semiotics: Selected Essays (1994),
• Ethics and the Theory of Rationality: Selected Essays (1996),
• Filosofia analitica e filosofia continentale (1997),
• From a Transcendental-Semiotic Point of View (1998)
• Mercier Lectures: "The Response of Discourse Ethics to the Moral Challenge of the Human Situation As Such, Especially Today" (2001),
• Funf Vorlesungen uber Transzendental Semiotik als Erste Philosophie und Diskursethik (2002),
• Diskursethik und Diskursanthropologie (2002)

External links

• Personal website