Friedrich Kambartel


Friedrich Kambartel is a philosopher.

Biography

Kambartel studied mathematics, physics, chemistry and philosophy at the University of Münster, where he received his PhD and his “habilitation”, the postdoctoral lecture qualification. In 1966 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Constance, where he took active part in the reformation of the university. Kambartel has close ties to the Erlangen School of constructivist philosophy of science. He taught at Frankfurt am Main from 1993 until his retirement in 2000.
Currently Kambartel is working together with his daughter on a conceptual novel.
Kambartel’s main research areas are the philosophy of language, the philosophy of the natural sciences, and the philosophy of mind. However, he also did work in logic, action theory, ethics and the philosophy of economics.
His most important works are the habilitation thesis “Erfahrung und Struktur”, published by Suhrkamp in 1968, as well as the two anthologies “Theorie und Begründung” and “Philosophie der humanen Welt”, also published by Suhrkamp.
Two major topics are present throughout Kambartel’s work — on the one hand the primacy of practical reason, and on the other the conception of reason as culture.
The first topic shapes his work in the philosophies of science, mind, and action. If practical reason were granted primacy over theoretical reason, if the latter were only possible on the basis of the former, then results obtained by neuroscience, for example, could never show that man is determined after all and cannot really act freely.
The second topic does not emerge clearly until his later work, and then it also marks a distance to the constructive attempts of the Erlangen School. Reason was not to be understood exactly, e.g. to be defined as a principle or criterion. Reason was rather a culture you grow into, a social practice within which you cultivate your judgment. Conceptual judgments like Kant’s formula of man as an end in itself served as comments to parts of the “grammar” of this culture. Contrary to what Kant believed, morality was not supreme; it was only one standard of rationality among others; reason integrated this standard and weighed it up against other standards of rationality.

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