The Space of Reasons and the Community of Communication of Reasoners

  • Matthias Kettner Universität Witten/Herdecke
  • Laura Molina-Molina Universidad de Granada, Spain
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4049011
Keywords: Community of Communication, Dialectics, Karl-Otto Apel, Discursive Rationality, Transcendental Pragmatics of Language

Abstract

Karl-Otto Apel's 'transcendental pragmatics of language', his mature philosophic position, contains a number of claims concerning the community of communication that appear hard to reconcile. I reconstruct, and give a coherent account of, Apel's claims that the community of communication is transcendental, real and also ideal, apriori, dialectical, and the medium of discursive rationality. Apel's concept of the community of communication does not refer to the set of all beings that can communicate with each other. Rather, Apel's concept refers to a specific intrinsically normative understanding of one's relatedness to others and their relatedness to oneself, that is necessary to share for all persons involved whenever they intend to articulate linguistically and triangulate intersubjectively their experiences, all validity-claims which they raise concerning their experiences, and all reasons which they think are good enough to justify the respective validity-claims.

Author Biographies

Matthias Kettner, Universität Witten/Herdecke

Matthias Kettner is professor of practical philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities and Arts at Witten/Herdecke University (www.uni-wh.de) in Germany. He was Dean between 2003 and 2006, and he is now Dean of Research. From 1994 to 2000 he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Essen University (www.kwi-nrw.de) where his research focused on clinical ethics committees in Germany, communicative ethics, and the relations between applied ethics, biopolitics and democracy. In 1987-1993 he collaborated with Karl-Otto Apel in his research on discourse ethics at Frankfurt University where he had earned a PhD in philosophy (thesis advisors: K.-O. Apel and J. Habermas), a diploma in psychology, and his postdoctoral lecturer qualification (Habilitation).

Laura Molina-Molina, Universidad de Granada, Spain

Laura Molina-Molina is postdoctoral investigator of DAAD at the Internationales Zentrum für Philosophie of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, Germany. Her main areas of investigation are: K. O. Apels Theory of Knowldege and critical hermeneutics and the concept of truth in the New Realism of M. Ferraris and M. Gabriel. Most recent publications: Molina-Molina, L. (2019), "Recogiendo el testigo de Karl-Otto Apel. Hacia una integración de la antropología del conocimiento y la pragmática trascendental del lenguaje", Pensamiento. Revista de Investigación e Información Filosófica (in print); Molina-Molina, L. (2019), Lenguaje y corporalidad en la filosofía de K.O. Apel, Granada: Comares.

References

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Published
2020-03-31
How to Cite
[1]
Kettner, M. and Molina-Molina, L. 2020. The Space of Reasons and the Community of Communication of Reasoners. Disputatio. 9, 12 (Mar. 2020), 183-203. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4049011.
Issue
Vol. 9 No. 12 (2020): Discursive Critical Rationality. A Tribute to Karl Otto Apel
Section
Articles and Essays

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