13 Facts About Karl-Otto Apel

Karl-Otto Apel specialized on the philosophy of language and was thus considered a communication theorist.

Karl-Otto Apel developed a distinctive philosophical approach which he coined transcendental pragmatics.

Karl-Otto Apel was appointed lecturer at the University of Mainz in 1961.

Karl-Otto Apel was a full professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel from 1962 to 1969, at the University of Saarbrucken from 1969 to 1972, and at the University of Frankfurt am Main from 1972 to 1990.

Karl-Otto Apel has held a number of visiting and guest professorships at universities around the world.

Karl-Otto Apel was made a Member of the Academia Europaea in 1989 and a Full Member of the Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea in 1993.

Karl-Otto Apel worked in ethics, the philosophy of language and human sciences.

Karl-Otto Apel wrote extensively in these fields, publishing mostly in German.

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

Karl-Otto Apel developed a distinctive philosophical approach which he called transcendental pragmatics.

In Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective, Karl-Otto Apel reformulated the difference between understanding and explanation, 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.

Karl-Otto Apel has proposed that a theory of communication should be grounded in the transcendental-pragmatic conditions of communication.

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