Background
Andreas was born in 1962, in Wiesbaden, Germany.
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Die idealistische Kritik des Willens
(In “Die idealistische Kritik des Willens” (“German Ideali...)
In “Die idealistische Kritik des Willens” (“German Idealism’s Critique of the Will”) (1992) Dorschel defends an understanding of freedom as choice against Immanuel Kant’s and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s ethical animadversions. Following a method of critical analysis, Dorschel 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”) and to Hegel’s doctrine that “freedom of the will is rendered real as law” (“die Freiheit des Willens als Gesetz verwirklicht”). What renders freedom of the will real, Dorschel argues, is rather to exercise choice sensibly. Determinism, if we are to make sense of the idea, would have to be correlated with the notion of prediction. Predictions, Dorschel argues, need a basis that is not affected by their being made. But just as I cannot overtake my own shadow, I cannot predict my own future behaviour from my present state. For I would alter my state by making the prediction. This line of reasoning can do without Kant’s opposition of determinism about appearances and freedom of the thing-in-itself.
Rethinking Prejudice
(“Rethinking Prejudice” (2000, reissued 2019) examines the...)
“Rethinking Prejudice” (2000, reissued 2019) examines the Enlightenment’s struggle against prejudices and the Counter-Enlightenment’s partisanship in favour of them. Dorschel subverts that controversy by way of refuting an assumption shared by both parties, viz., that prejudices are bad or good, false or true because they are prejudices. He seeks out the common source of both parties’ errors through rendering each position as strong as possible. 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. 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.
Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren
(In “Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren” (“Design –...)
In “Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren” (“Design – The Aesthetics of Useful Things”) (2002), Dorschel probes different ways of assessing artefacts. He observes that the concepts of the useful and of purpose have been replaced in the philosophy of design by that of function. ‘Function’ seemed to maintain its older meaning, but covered a bias towards technology. The question of ‘how’ (how does this machine function?) replaced the question of ‘what’ (for what purpose?). Purpose embodies the question of ‘what’; technology the question of ‘how’. Thus Dorschel criticizes that function has a diffuse meaning, under which one could understand both purpose and technology and concludes that because of that diffuse meaning it is advisable to consider not function, as modern functionalism did, but rather purpose and technology as basic concepts of a theory of design. This allows him to set up a controversy not just with modernism, but also with postmodernism in the philosophy of design.
Andreas Dorschel
Edit ProfileEducation
From 1983 on, Dorschel 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).
Career
Since 2002, Andreas Dorschel has been professor of aesthetics and head of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of the Arts Graz (Austria). He was Visiting Professor at Emory University (1995) and at Stanford University (2006). Between 2008 and 2017, Dorschel was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF); from 2012 to 2017 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). From 2010 on, he has been on the Advisory Board of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) Music and Philosophy Study Group. In 2019, Andreas Dorschel was elected member of the Academia Europaea. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies Berlin during the academic year 2020/21.
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