“Draft:Hans-Herbert Kögler”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Hans-Herbert Kögler (born January 13, 1960 in Darmstadt), is a German-American philosopher and social theorist.

Biography

1960 born in Darmstadt, Kögler studied after finishing the Viktoriaschule in Darmstadt in Frankfurt philosophy, history of art and pedagogics. During his studies he was supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (National German Fellowship Foundation) and wrote his doctoral dissertation 1991 under the direction of Jürgen Habermas. During this work he already opened his European point of view to philosophical discussion in the United States with academic stays at Northwestern University, The New School, and Berkeley. Finally he found his place of teaching here. From 1991 on he was teaching as an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1997 he received a call to the University of North Florida, Jacksonville. In 2007/2008 he became the Department Chair (until 2015) and Full Professor. All the years in the States he mainted academic contacts to Europe, first to the Austrian Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt, where he was teaching as a guest professor (2004; 2006, 2010, since 2014 regularly), also to Prague (2003).^[1]

Work

Kögler developed an internationally recognized and influential critical hermeneutics whose ethos consists in the recognition of the other through dialogical understanding, whereby the social and cultural influences of power and domination are deliberately reflected on the process of understanding. Understanding is understood as a reflexive attitude towards everything that is at first strange and meaningfully inaccessible to us, the goal of which is a radical questioning of one's own as well as of other certainties and prejudices. A first paradigmatic formulation can be found in Die Macht des Dialogs (1992), whose American edition The Power of Dialogue (1996, 1999) received worldwide attention. ^[2] Furthermore, Kögler has articulated and developed his project in more than 60 journal articles and book chapters.

One of the most important developments is the project of a dialogical cosmopolitanism and the idea of agency. Cosmopolitanism is philosophically grounded as a reflexive attitude to globalization based on cognitive abilities, including context-sensitive comprehension, normative orientation to universal values and rules, and critical reflection of power relations. These cognitive abilities are introduced by Kögler as prerequisites for a cosmopolitan public sphere. Kögler's theory of agency fuses hermeneutic and existential approaches with George Herbert Mead’s subject theory, whereby the intersubjective origin of self-identity as well as the irreducibility of the subject to given contexts or structures stand in the foreground.

Reception

Kögler's critical-hermeneutical approach was broadly discussed in the Anglo-Saxon academic discussions.^[3] His impulses are to be found among education theorists, psychologists, anthropologists, social scientists generally, as well as in gender research and by feminist authors. Readers and former students reimported his views and impulses into European discussions, for instance in Norway, Denmark, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, New Zealand, Canada, Brazil, and Italy, among others. Also Kögler's critical analysis of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology is influential, the leading journal Social Epistemology devoted a special issue in 1997 to his interpretations.^[4]. His discussion with Bourdieu did not stop as his articles show.^[5]

Bibliography

A full lengh bibliography, especially of his articles, published in English, German, French, Czech, Italian, and Russian, up to the year 2008 is available on the personal web site of the University of North Florida; recent literature can be accessed via researchgate.^[6]

Works

Edited Works

Literature

Weblinks

References

1. ^Cf. his CV on his personal web site at the University of North Florida, [https://www.unf.edu/~hkoegler/experience.html], retrieved 2018-08-10.
2. ^ The theme of Kögler’s dissertation, from which this book derives, is a central issue of the philosophical discussions in Germany of the 1960ies and 1970ies, i.e. how a hermeneutic and intentional understanding of human agency can be reconciled with social critique and the analysis of power. Its representatives were Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method and Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. For Kögler understanding includes criticism, but criticism must be based on context-sensitivity and respect for the self-understanding of the agents. Connecting link is for him the dialogue, and dialogue implicates dealing with power. That is why Kögler takes also the French philosopher Michel Foucault into the dialogue. Kögler develops including the French poststructuralism hermeneutics into critical hermeneutcs. The importance of Foucault for Kögler is shown by his introduction into the work of his french social philosopher, first published in german in 1994 and in a revised expanded edition in 2004. Richard Rorty becomes important for Kögler as critic of ethnocentric perspectives of truth.
3. ^Cf. for instance the dissertations of Alex D. Scheinmann, From explanation to understanding. Diss. George Mason University; 2009.
4. ^Cf. Social Epistemology 11,2 (1997)
5. ^Cf. Kögler’s recent articles “Overcoming Semiotic Structuralism: Language and Habitus in Bourdieu”, in: Simon Susan / Brygan S. Turner (eds.), The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays. Anthem Press, London 2011, 271-300 and “Unavoidable Idealizations and the Reality of Symbolic Power”, in: Social Epistemology 27, 3-4 (2013) 302-314.
6. ^Cf. [https://www.unf.edu/~hkoegler/experience.html Researchgate]