Karl-Otto Apel, as much as any German theorist, bridges the gulf between Anglo-American and continental thought in both the style and content of his work. Understanding and Explanation clarifies the "explanation versus understanding" debate that has become central to the philosophy of the social sciences. Apel reexamines the debate over the logic of the social sciences from the perspective of an expanded theory of science, and he proposes a resolution in transcendent-pragmatic terms. He differentiates three legitimate approaches to the social sciences, connected with three "knowledge-constitutive" interests: deductive-nomological sciences, historical-hermeneutic sciences, and critical-reconstructive sciences.Understanding and Explanation is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Politics & Social Sciences

Karl-Otto Apel

Philosophy

MIT Press]

Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism

Prometheus+books

Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective

Thomas McCarthy

Suhrkamp Verlag

MIT Press (MA)

<p>Charles Sanders Peirce is widely recognized as the founder of American pragmatism. Apel's systematic, sweeping, and innovative study quickly turned into a classic of Peirce scholarship when first published and became a major factor during the late sixties and early seventies in the discovery of pragmatism by Continental philosophy. The work discusses the historical importance of pragmatism as one of the major modern responses to the 'disintegration of the Hegelian synthesis'. As a mediation between theory and praxis, Apel presents pragmatism as the major rival to both existentialism and Marxism, the two other responses to the Hegelian aftermath. In the same context, Apel demonstrates the importance of Peirce's conceptual breakthroughs, in the theory of signs (semiotics) and the theory of rationality, for the challenges and possibilities of a critical theory of society. The contemporary developments of the Frankfurt School, in its third generation now, cannot be understood without Apel's appropriations of Peirce for a grounding of a critical theory of society as formulated in this systematic reconstruction of modern philosophy. This work is also crucial for an understanding of Apel's own philosophical project of a transcendental pragmatics, or semiotics. With the revival of Peirce studies, and the rediscovery of the pragmatist tradition in American philosophical thinking, this study articulates a very contemporary and relevant interpretation that may challenge and even go against the grain of many so-called Neopragmatists. This book will also be of interest to those scholars interested in the development of post World War-II German thought, and the influence of North American thinking on European thought in general.</p>

University of Massachusetts Press

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Books by Karl-Otto Apel