Günter Abel (philosopher)

Günter Abel (born November 7, 1947 in Homberg ) is a German philosopher and has been a professor of theoretical philosophy at the Technical University of Berlin since 1987 .

Life

Abel studied philosophy , history , Romance studies and political science at the University of Marburg and the University of Lausanne . After receiving a doctorate on the philosophy of the Stoa in 1974, Abel completed his habilitation in 1981 with a thesis on Friedrich Nietzsche . Since 1987 he has been Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Technical University of Berlin . From 1999 to 2001 he was Vice President of the Technical University of Berlin , from 2002 to 2005 he was President of the German Society for Philosophy (DGPhil) . Since 2008 he has been a member of the board of the global umbrella organization of the national philosophy societies FISP (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophy), and since the end of 2010 he has been a member of the Institut International de Philosophie . He has been a visiting professor at ETH Zurich since 2011, and in 2013 he was appointed an associate fellow of the Collegium Helveticum at ETH Zurich. He is a member of the Academia Europaea .

plant

The “General Philosophy of Signs and Interpretation” developed by Günter Abel is based on the critical insight that human speech, thought and action, our understanding of the world and ourselves and the understanding of other people are tied to a practice of interpretation and the use of signs. All human life, from perception to reflection and action, are thus characterized as "interpretive" and "constructive" and take place in signs , which means that reality that can be experienced by humans has always been based on systems of description, symbols and interpretation whose functions depends. According to Abel, this ultimately also proves the idea of ​​a non-interpreted reality to be wrong. Because of this constitutive role of interpretations, Abel also speaks - following Nelson Goodman's speech of "ways of worldmaking" - of worlds of interpretation. On the basis of these basic considerations, Abel has developed a heuristic three-stage model of the relationships of signs and interpretations, which he uses in various fields and subject areas of philosophy. His publications include elaborations of the approach in the partially overlapping areas of epistemology , philosophy of mind , philosophy of knowledge and sciences ("knowledge research"), philosophy of language , symbol theory, philosophy of perception, ethics , creativity theory, philosophy of art and aesthetics .

Abel is considered a renowned Nietzsche expert who tries to explain and justify elements of Nietzsche's philosophy using the methods of modern analytical philosophy . A special focus is on Nietzsche's epistemology , which has some points of contact with Abel's own interpretation philosophy.

literature

Monographs

• Stoicism and the Early Modern Age. On the history of the origins of modern thought in the field of ethics and politics. Walter de Gruyter , Berlin 1978, ISBN 3110072629 .
• Nietzsche . The dynamic of the will to power and the eternal return. Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1984 (2nd edition, expanded to include a foreword 1998), ISBN 978-3110151916 .
• Worlds of interpretation. Contemporary philosophy beyond essentialism and relativism , Suhrkamp , Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 978-3518581346 .
• Language, signs, interpretation. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 978-3518582824 .
• Signs of reality. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 978-3518292518 .

Editorships (selection)

• Nietzsche studies. International yearbook for Nietzsche research. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin (since 1996 managing editorially published together with J. Simon and W. Stegmaier ; one volume with approx. 500 pages appears per year)
• Creativity . Colloquium lectures of the XX. German Congress for Philosophy, TU Berlin , September 2005 , Meiner , Hamburg 2006.

Secondary literature

• Astrid Wagner: Tolerance as recognition. Ethical and Political Consequences of Signs and Philosophy of Interpretation, in: Astrid Wagner u. a. (Ed.), Harmony, Tolerance, Cultural Diversity. Enlightenment impulses from Leibniz to the present. Würzburg 2017. pp. 241-254.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Directory of members: Günter Abel. Academia Europaea, accessed June 16, 2017 . 

Web links

• Literature by and about Günter Abel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Günter Abel at perlentaucher.de
• Abel's site at the TU Berlin