From hermeneutics to semiotics: Karl-Otto Apel's transformation of transcendental philosophy

Discourse ethics is one of the most contemporary and controversial theories of ethics. It is contemporaneous because it attempts to formulate a theory of ethics that takes into account all of the major advances in philosophical thinking and their challenges to the foundations of any future ethical theory (i.e., critique of the solipsistic, autarkic subject; ordinary language pragmatics; meaning constitution and validity justification; universality versus particularity, etc.) It is controversial because of its elaboration of the ethical as the injunction to see everything from the standpoint of the generalized Other (Justice) which simultaneously factors in the social conditions that enable moral subjects to orient themselves toward moral maxims (Solidarity). Discourse ethics may be understood as a synthesis of Hegel and Kant, vis-a-vis the mediation of pragmatism, more precisely via Peirce (in Apel, Kettner, Kuhlmann), and Mead (in Habermas, Benhabib, Fraser). This dissertation is a reconstruction of the philosophical origins of discourse ethics, which in turn are investigated through a reconstruction of the path of development of its original formulator: Karl-Otto Apel. His Denkweq is characterized as a shift from Hermeneutics to Semiotics, indicating a transition in philosophical traditions from German hermeneutics and ontology to North American pragmatism. The work shows the extent to which Peirce, Royce, and Mead influenced Apel's understanding of ethics, leading him to formulate as early as 1967, the fundamental insights which have characterized discourse ethics. The dissertation begins with a discussion of Apel's doctoral dissertation, Dasein und Erkennen. This chapters shows how in this work Apel elaborated a philosophical-anthropological reading of Heidegger's existential hermeneutics with the intent of developing a theory of knowledge. Chapter two deals with Apel's Habilitation: Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. It shows how this work marked Apel's turn to the study of language as the point of departure for all future philosophizing. Here Apel's four major traditions that determined today's philosophy of language are reconstructed and analyzed. The third chapter deals with Apel's magnus opus, Transformation der Philosophie. This work is analyzed from the standpoint of how it contributes to a linguistic turn of German philosophy, and how it inaugurates both "transcendental semiotics" and "discourse ethics." The fourth chapter is a comparative analysis between Apel's transcendental semiotics and Jurgen Habermas's "universal pragmatics." The last chapter deals with discourse ethics and its contemporary contenders: postmodern ethics and liberation ethics (Dussel). This chapter answers the question whether discourse ethics is the appropriate answer to a postcolonial and postmodern world; that is, one that has superseded its eurocentrism and false universalism.