Hans Albert


Hans Albert is a German philosopher. Born in Cologne, he lives in Heidelberg.
His fields of research are Social Sciences and General Studies of Methods. He is a critical rationalist, paying special attention to rational heuristics. He is a strong critic of the continental hermeneutic tradition coming from Heidegger and Gadamer.

Albert's critical rationalism

Albert held the chair of Social Sciences and General Studies of Methods at the University of Mannheim. He is also a much-cited philosopher. Most importantly, he developed Popper's critical rationalism into a concise, broad-ranging maxim, thereby extending it from a method to progress in science to one equally applicable in day-to-day heuristics.
To substantiate his approach, he provided evidence for his thesis that there is no field of human activities where one should not be critical. Consequently, he advocated applying critical rationalism to the social sciences, especially to economics, politics, jurisprudence, and religion.
In his view the attitude of criticism is one of the oldest European traditions in comparison with other less critical traditions.
Before his many books were published, Hans Albert was already known to a broader audience for his contributions to the positivism dispute arguing against his opponents of the so-called Frankfurt School. His contributions included
Albert observed that new insights are often difficult to spread or proliferate. He ascribed this phenomenon's cause to ideological obstacles, for which Albert coined the phrase 'immunity against criticism'.
Albert's well known Münchhausen trilemma is ironically named after Baron Munchausen, who allegedly pulled himself out of a swamp seizing himself by his shock of hair. This trilemma rounds off the classical problem of justification in the theory of knowledge. It concludes that all attempts to rationally justify or rather ultimately verify a thesis must inherently fail. This verdict concerns not only deductive justifications, as many of his critics believe, but also inductive, causal, transcendental, and all otherwise structured justifications. As Albert reasons, they all will be in vain, since a justification inevitably faces one of three flaws:
  1. All justification in pursuit of certain knowledge simultaneously has to justify the means of justification or rather the validity of its premises - an effort which leads to an infinite regress.
  2. One can cut the chain of reasons short, for instance, by pointing to self-evidence or common sense or fundamental principles or another basic premise that shall not be further questioned. But in doing so the intention to arrive at a universally valid justification is abandoned, because the reasoning cannot be accepted, unless one accepts the validity of one premise for its own sake.
  3. The third horn of the trilemma is the equally unsatisfying application of a circular argument.
Albert stressed repeatedly that there is no limitation of the Münchhausen trilemma to deductive conclusions. Hence, Albert points out, justification is rendered virtually impossible regardless of the specific content of a thesis, justification is impossible at all. From this notion, Albert draws the conclusion that progress in science can only be achieved by means of falsification rather than inductive verification.
To observe and criticize the endeavors made to escape from the quagmire of certain justification became an instructive part of Hans Albert's philosophy. A prominent example of these efforts his discussion of the ideas of Karl-Otto Apel, one of Germany's leading philosophers.
Still, Albert argues that critical rationalists have to accept that those attempts of rigorous justification are not entirely futile, since only as long as alternative methods are without success can critical rationalism be called successful.

Albert's style of writing and criticizing

Albert's plea is for critical rationalism. He avoids solemn preaching in favor of serious, serene discussion with people of different faith and thinking. While Popper always warned not to follow one's opponent into the mire, Albert follows them into their favored field of thinking on their own terms. So he criticized Heidegger's "being in the abyss", Gadamer's "horizons melting together", Habermas's "consensual theoretical truth in the ideal discourse", Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental arguments, the theologian Hans Küng's "absolute-relative, this-life-and-hereafter, transcendental-immanent, allconcerning-allcontrolling most real reality in the very heart of things". Hans Albert meticulously follows their arguments to uncover:
Underlying suppositions and injunctions of Albert's method are:
In 1950 Hans Albert earned his first degree as a 'Diplom-Kaufmann', followed by an Academic degree of a Dr. rer.pol. 1952. In the years 1952-1958 he worked as an assistant at the 'Forschungsinstitut für Sozial- und Verwaltungswissenschaften' of the University of Cologne. In 1957 he got the degree of a 'Dr. habil. for Social Politics' at the University of Cologne. As a lecturer he read logic, theory of science and economics of the welfare state. Since 1958 he has been participating the Alpbacher Hochschulwochen. It was there he made the acquaintance of Karl Popper after having studied Popper's philosophy and having mostly accepted it long ago. After 1955 he had exciting discussions with Paul Feyerabend, who in those times was a critical rationalist and an admirer of Karl Popper. Their letters later were published. In 1963 Albert finally got the chair of 'Social Sciences and General Studies of Methods' at the Wirtschaftshochschule Mannheim.
1961-1969 was the time of the so-called 'Positivismusstreit', i.e. the debate between Karl Popper and Theodor W. Adorno concerning positivism within German sociology during the 1960s. Albert participated at this meanwhile famous Conference of the German Society of Sociology 1961 in Tübingen. In the beginning there was no dispute on positivism, because Adorno as well as Popper were opposed to positivism. The debate was more about the differences between social sciences and natural sciences and the status of values in the social sciences. 1963 The debate was continued by Jürgen Habermas in the Festschrift für Adorno. 1964 On the Soziologentag in Heidelberg the debate grew up into an excited discussion between Habermas and Albert. The famous dispute culminated in a collection of essays published in 1969, translated into several languages, also into English. This dispute gained a broad audience.
In 1989 Hans Albert retired from active service as Professor Emeritus but continued writing books and giving lectures at many universities, such as the 1990 lectures at the University of Graz on Critical Rationalism, the 1995 'Walter Adolf Lectures' at the Hochschule St. Gallen, and the 1998 Wittgenstein-Lectures at the University of Bayreuth about Critical Rationalism.
He was honored with the 'Vits prize' 1976 and with the 'Arthur Burckhard prize' 1984. He was decorated with the Austrian 'Ehrenkreuz für Kunst und Wissenschaft der Republik Österreich' and got honorary doctorates of the universities of Linz/Austria, Athens/Greece, Kassel/Germany, Graz/Austria, and Klagenfurt/Austria.

Decorations and awards

Hans Albert, 'Autobiographische Einleitung', in: Kritische Vernunft und menschliche Praxis, Stuttgart 1977, pages 5-33. Hans Albert, 'Mein Umweg in die Soziologie. Vom Kulturpessimismus zum kritischen Rationalismus', in: Christian Fleck, Wege zur Soziologie. Autobiographiche Notizen, Leske + Budrich, Opladen, pages 17-37. Eric Hilgendorf: Hans Albert. Zur Einführung Junius Verlag 1997. Hans Albert, In Kontroversen verstrickt. Vom Kulturpessimismus zum kritischen Rationalismus, LIT Verlag 2007, 264 p.

Publications

Albert published around 30 books. Some of them are translated into different languages.

English books

As for Hans Albert's scientific articles see List of Publications maintained by Hans-Joachim Niemann in . See also the Hans-Joachim Niemann initiated German Wikibook: Studienführer Hans Albert
. It contains a large publication list with many quotations of English written articles as well as articles translated into Italian, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian language. You will find also a lot of secondary literature.