Hans-Herbert Kögler
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Biography
1960 born in Darmstadt. After finishing the Viktoriaschule in Darmstadt, Kögler studied in Frankfurt philosophy, history of art, and sociology of education. He was supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (National German Fellowship Foundation) for a doctoral fellowship as well as a one-year USA-stipend. He completed his doctoral dissertation 1991 under the direction of Jürgen Habermas. During this work he already opened his European point of view to philosophical discussion in the United States with academic stays at Northwestern University (T. McCarthy), The New School (R. Bernstein), and Berkeley (H. Dreyfus). After returning to Frankfurt to complete his PhD, he began his US teaching career in 1991—first as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then following a call to the University of North Florida, Jacksonville. He received two NEH faculty fellowships (1997 Boston University, 2000 University of Arizona, Tucson). In 2007/2008 he became the UNF Philosophy Department Chair (until 2015) and Full Professor. All the years in the States he maintained academic contacts to Europe, first to the Austrian Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt, where he was teaching as a guest professor (2004; 2006, 2010, since 2014 regularly), also to Prague (2003).
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Work
Kögler developed a 'critical hermeneutics' which received attention in the social sciences and social theory. The first paradigmatic formulation can be found in Die Macht des Dialogs (1992), whose American edition The Power of Dialogue (1996, 1999) received international attention.
Furthermore, Kögler articulated and developed his project in more than 80 journal articles and book chapters. Important developments include a 'dialogical cosmopolitanism' and the problem of agency. Kögler's cosmopolitanism integrates a context-sensitive comprehension, normative orientation to universal values and rules, and critical reflection of power relations. Kögler's theory of agency fuses hermeneutic and existential approaches with George Herbert Mead's theory of the self.
Reception
Kögler made influential contributions to the philosophy of the social sciences, hermeneutics, and critical theory. His critical-hermeneutic approach is widely received in the Anglo-American as well as the global context. His impulses can be found among education theorists, psychologists, anthropologists, and social scientists generally, as well as in gender research and by feminist authors. Readers and former students reimported his views and impulses into European discussions, for instance in Norway, Denmark, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, New Zealand, Canada, Brazil, and Italy, among others. The journal Social Epistemology devoted a special issue in 1997 to Kögler's critical analysis of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology. His critical engagement with Bourdieu continued.
Jubilee workshop
In February 2020 a conference with more than 15 philosophers and sociologues from the United States, Europe and the United Arab Emirates honored Kögler with their contributions in a two days workshop Hermeneutics, Critique, and Dialogue.