Hans Albert (German: [ˈalbɛʁt]; 8 February 1921 – 24 October 2023) was a German philosopher. He was professor of social sciences at the University of Mannheim from 1963, and remained at the university until 1989. His fields of research were social sciences and general studies of methods. He was a critical rationalist, paying special attention to rational heuristics. Albert was a strong critic of the continental hermeneutic tradition coming from Heidegger and Gadamer.
Life and career Albert was born in Cologne, Germany, on 8 February 1921, the son of a teacher of Latin and history. He served in WW2, gaining the Iron Cross 2nd Class. In 1950 he earned a degree in business administration at the University of Cologne, followed by a PhD in social politics in 1952. From 1952–1958 he worked as an assistant at the research institute for social and administrative sciences at the university, where he also obtained a Dr. habil. in social politics in 1957. As a lecturer, he read logic, theory of science, and economics of the welfare state. Beginning in 1958 he participated in the Alpbacher Hochschulwochen (a summer conference in the Austrian alpine village of Alpbach), where he met Karl Popper after having studied and mostly embracing his philosophy. After 1955, he had discussions with Paul Feyerabend, who in those times was a critical rationalist and an admirer of Karl Popper. Their letters were later published. In 1963, Albert received the Social Sciences and General Studies of Methods chair (later named Sociology and Studies of Economics) at Wirtschaftshochschule Mannheim (later University of Mannheim). 1961–1969 was the time of the so-called Positivismusstreit (positivism dispute), the debate between Karl Popper and Theodor W. Adorno concerning positivism within German sociology during the 1960s. Albert participated at this meanwhile famous Tagung der deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (Conference of the German Society of Sociology) in 1961 in Tübingen. In the beginning, there was no dispute on positivism, because both Adorno and 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. In 1963, the debate was continued by Jürgen Habermas in the Festschrift für Adorno. In 1964, in the Soziologentag (Conference on Sociology) in Heidelberg, the debate grew into an excited discussion between Habermas and Albert. The dispute culminated in a collection of essays, published in 1969 and translated into several languages. This dispute gained a broad audience. In 1989, Albert retired from active service as a 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 Hochschule St. Gallen, and the 1998 Wittgenstein-Lectures at the University of Bayreuth (with Rainer Hegselmann) about critical rationalism.
Personal life Albert lived in Heidelberg with his Austrian wife; they had a son. On 8 February 2021, Hans Albert reached 100 years of age, thus becoming a centenarian. Albert died in Heidelberg on 24 October 2023, at age 102.
Work
Critical rationalism Albert 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 (going back to the pre-Socratics), in comparison with other less critical traditions. Before his many books were published, 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 of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute of Sociology. His contributions included
differentiating between critical rationalism and positivism arguing against some strains of sociology opposing the application of methods used in natural sciences suggesting that the role of values and the scientific handling of values has to be given new thought interpreting Max Weber not as supporting value-free science, but as demonstrating that scientists can "be free of any value judgement", even for research in the fields of values. 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 reasoned, they all will be in vain, since a justification inevitably faces one of three flaws:
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