Andreas Dorschel

Andreas Dorschel
Born 1962
Wiesbaden, Germany
Residence Austria
Nationality German
Alma mater Goethe University Frankfurt
University of Vienna
Awards Caroline-Schlegel-Preis 2014
Era 20th- / 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy

Andreas Dorschel (born 1962) is a German philosopher. Since 2002, he has been professor of aesthetics and head of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of the Arts Graz (Austria).

Background

Andreas Dorschel was born in 1962 in Wiesbaden, West Germany. From 1983 on, he studied philosophy, musicology and linguistics at the universities of Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) (MA 1987, PhD 1991). In 2002, the University of Bern (Switzerland) awarded him the Habilitation degree (post-doctoral lecturing qualification). Dorschel has taught at universities in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the UK.[1] At University of East Anglia Norwich (UK), he was a colleague of writer W.G. Sebald.[2] Dorschel was Visiting Professor at Emory University (1995) and at Stanford University (2006).[3] Since 2008, he has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF);[4] in 2012 he joined the Review Panel of the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) Joint Research Programme of the European Science Foundation (ESF) (Strasbourg / Brussels).[5] From 2010 on, Dorschel has been on the Advisory Board of the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group.[6]

Research

Work

In his philosophical studies, Dorschel explores, both in a systematic and historical vein, the interconnectedness of thought and action. His work has been influenced by philosophers Denis Diderot, Arthur Schopenhauer and R. G. Collingwood.

Will

In Die idealistische Kritik des Willens [German Idealism’s Critique of the Will] (1992) Dorschel defends an understanding of freedom as choice against Kant’s and Hegel’s ethical animadversions. He objects both to Kant’s claim that „a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same thing“ („ein freier Wille und ein Wille unter sittlichen Gesetzen einerlei“)[7] and to Hegel’s doctrine that „freedom of the will is rendered real as law“ („die Freiheit des Willens als Gesetz verwirklicht“).[8] What renders freedom of the will real, Dorschel argues, is rather to exercise choice sensibly.[9]

Prejudice

Rethinking Prejudice (2000) examines the Enlightenment’s struggle against prejudices and the Counter-Enlightenment’s partisanship in favour of them. „Dorschel wants to subvert that controversy by way of refuting an assumption shared by both parties“ („Dorschel will diesen Streit unterlaufen, indem er eine von beiden geteilte Annahme widerlegt“),[10] to wit, that prejudices are bad or good, false or true because they are prejudices. As Richard Raatzsch puts it, Dorschel „seeks out the common source of both parties’ errors through rendering each position as strong as possible“ („den gemeinsamen Quellen der Irrtümer beider Seiten nachgeht, indem er sie so plausibel wie möglich zu machen sucht“).[11] Prejudices, Dorschel concludes, can be true or false, intelligent or stupid, wise or foolish, positive or negative, good or bad, racist or humanist – and they possess none of these features simply qua prejudices.[12] The conclusion's significance derives from the fact that it is part and parcel of „an account which preserves something of the common-sense notion of prejudice, rather than an abstract list of necessary and sufficient conditions that risks neglecting what people have historically meant and continue to mean by the term.“[13]

Design

In Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren [Design – The Aesthetics of Useful Things] (2002), Dorschel probes different ways of assessing artefacts. Ludwig Hasler characterizes the book as a „cure via argumentative precision“ („argumentative Präzisionskur“), setting up „a controversy [...] both with modern functionalism, the movement that revolutionized design for a century, and with postmodernism, that sportive celebration of whimsy in matters of form“ („eine Streitschrift […] gegen den Funktionalismus der Moderne, der ein Jahrhundert lang die Gestaltung der Gebrauchsdinge revolutionierte, wie gegen die Postmoderne, die sich auf den Spass an der Beliebigkeit der Formen kaprizierte“).[14]

Metamorphosis

Dorschel’s Verwandlung. Mythologische Ansichten, technologische Absichten [Mutation. Mythological Views, Technological Purposes] (2009) represents a philosophical history of the idea of metamorphosis – "shaded in many nuances".[15] Metamorphosis, Dorschel points out, defies analysis in terms of change. Change is supposed to be a rational pattern: A thing remains what it is while its features alter. But where does a thing cease to be that thing, where do its features commence? Whatever were that thing devoid of its features? Hence, historically, the concept of change was shadowed by the idea of metamorphosis or mutation. Dorschel highlights this idea, setting forth – in four case studies – the character of metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman mythology, in the New Testament, in modern alchemy, and, finally, in current genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

Ideas

In his 2010 volume Ideengeschichte [History of Ideas], Dorschel explains key issues of method in his research fields.[16] Rejecting Quentin Skinner’s doctrine that ideas are „essentially linguistic“,[17] Dorschel asserts: „Words are just one medium of ideas among others; musicians conceive their products in tones, architects in spaces, painters in form and colour, mathematicians in numbers or, on a more abstract level, in functions“ („Worte sind nur ein Medium von Ideen unter anderen; Musiker denken in Tönen, Architekten in Räumen, Maler in Formen und Farben, Mathematiker in Zahlen oder, abstrakter, in Funktionen.“).[18]

Retrieving philosophical genres

Dorschel considers the narrowing-down of philosophical writing to articles and monographs a drain especially on epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. The now conventional forms of exposition leave little room for presenting a position while, as the argument develops, keeping various degrees of distance from the position presented. To that purpose, tapping richer resources of (dramatic and epic) irony as well as a heuristic of fiction, Dorschel has revived a number of genres such as the letter, dialogue, monologue and philosophical tale ('conte philosophique') that had flourished during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,[19] but fell out of favour with modern academic philosophers.[20]

Awards

Publications

Books

Articles

Letters, dialogues, monologues, philosophical tales

References

  1. ↑ Axel Schniederjürgen (ed.), art. „Dorschel, Andreas“. In: Kürschners Deutscher Gelehrten-Kalender 2014. Bio-bibliographisches Verzeichnis deutschsprachiger Wissenschaftler der Gegenwart. 26th edition, vol. 1 (A–G). De Gruyter, Berlin – Boston, Mass. 2014, p. 663.
  2. ↑ Letters by W.G. Sebald to Andreas Dorschel from 1997 in the German Literature Archive Cf. Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 59 (2015), pp. 465–466.
  3. ↑ FSI Stanford University, The Europe Center Lecture Archived December 26, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
  4. ↑ Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Board of Trustees Archived January 22, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
  5. ↑ European Science Foundation HERA Review Panel Archived April 30, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
  6. ↑ Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group
  7. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten AB 98.
  8. ↑ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. Georg Lasson. Felix Meiner, Leipzig 1923ff., p. 368.
  9. ↑ Short version of the argument in English: Andreas Dorschel, The Authority of the Will. In: The Philosophical Forum 33 (2002), no. 4, pp. 425–441.
  10. ↑ Richard Raatzsch, Über Wesen und Wert der Vorurteile. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50 (2002), no. 4, pp. 646–653, p. 652.
  11. ↑ Richard Raatzsch, Über Wesen und Wert der Vorurteile. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50 (2002), no. 4, pp. 646–653, p. 653.
  12. ↑ Andreas Dorschel, Rethinking Prejudice. Ashgate, Aldershot (UK) – Burlington (USA) – Singapore – Sydney 2000, p. xii.
  13. ↑ Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Prejudice by Andreas Dorschel. In: Philosophical Books 43 (2002), no. 2, pp. 156–157, p. 156.
  14. ↑ Ludwig Hasler, Die Schönheit der Büroklammer. In: Die Weltwoche 70 (2002), no. 29, pp. 60–61.
  15. ↑ Wolfgang Sandberger, Identität, Stabilität und Historizität. In: Musik-Konzepte N.F. XII/2011, pp. 73–89, p. 82: "in vielen Schattierungen abgestuft"; cf. p. 87.
  16. ↑ Review in diskurs Archived October 1, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
  17. ↑ Quentin Skinner, Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas. In: James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Polity Press, Cambridge 1988, pp. 29–67, p. 64.
  18. ↑ Andreas Dorschel, Ideengeschichte. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2010, p. 43.
  19. ↑ Cf. Robert Black, 'The philosopher and Renaissance culture', in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 13–29, p. 26; Stéphane van Damme, 'Philosophe/philosopher', in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 153–166, p. 158; on the connection, see George Huppert, The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999)
  20. ↑ An influential plea for an exclusion of such forms from philosophy "in the professional sense" was launched by Willard Van Orman Quine in Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Harvard, 1981), p. 192
  21. ↑ Forschungspreis des Landes Steiermark 2011
  22. ↑ Caroline-Schlegel-Preis 2014
  23. ↑ Book Review Codex flores Archived December 26, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
  24. ↑ Philip Alperson's page on website of College of Liberal Arts, Temple University Philadelphia, PA Archived January 27, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
  25. ↑ preview. Cf. Thomas Steinfeld, Der Welt abhandenkommen. Ein erstaunlicher Aufsatz: Andreas Dorschel über Eskapismus. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung 68, no. 39 (16 February 2012), p. 11.
  26. ↑ Cf. Martin Gessmann, Das Urgestein der Moderne. In: Philosophische Rundschau 60 (2013), no. 1, pp. 1–34, pp. 30–31.
  27. ↑ Cf. Gustav Seibt, Die Häresie der Abgrenzungen. Andreas Dorschel entwirft ein korinthisches Christentum. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung 69, no. 293 (19 December 2013), p. 14. Seibt stresses the boldness ("Kühnheit") of the text.

External links

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