Blackwell Reference Online

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Karl-Otto Appel was born on March 15, 1922 in Dusseldorf, Germany. During World War II he served in the Wehrmacht and later attended the University of Bonn, where he wrote his dissertation on Martin Heidegger and was awarded his doctorate in 1950. He wrote his habilitation “The Idea of Language in the Tradition from Dante to Vico” in 1960 in Mainz, where he taught as a lecturer the following year. He taught at the universities of Kiel and Saarbrucken until 1972, and was a professor at the University of Frankfurt from 1972 to 1990. His philosophical work focuses primarily on philosophy of language and ethics and attempts to bridge the traditions of Continental philosophy with analytic philosophy. In his work, Apel attempts to reformulate rational discourse that would generate a normative foundation for universal knowledge and communication. Apel is perhaps best known for his development of transcendental semiotics. In Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental–Pragmatic Perspective ( 1984 ), Apel takes up the question of the differences between understanding ( Verstehen ) and explanation ( Erklärung ), a debate that was generated through Wilhelm Dilthey's work in hermeneutics and Max Weber's concept of interpretive sociology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of Apel's political import lies in his general politicization of philosophy and of critical, ... log in or subscribe to read full text