Karl-Otto Apel 1922 – 2017

Karl-Otto Apel was a German philosopher and one of the principal architects, with Habermas, of discourse ethics. After early work on the history of linguistic philosophy, he developed his own program of transcendental pragmatics, which sought to ground ethics in the indispensable presuppositions of rational argumentation. His Transformation of Philosophy and his many essays on the philosophy of communication argued that anyone who genuinely engages in argument is already committed to the recognition of an ideal community of communication and to the norms that make such argument possible. He held a long professorship at Frankfurt and trained a generation of German moral and political theorists.