Friedrich Kambartel

Friedrich Kambartel (17 February 1935 – 25 April 2022), was a German philosopher.

Biography

Kambartel was born on 17 February 1935 in Münster, Germany. He studied physics, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Münster, where he received his PhD (in mathematics) and his "habilitation", the postdoctoral lecture qualification (in philosophy). In 1966 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Constance, where he took active part in making it a reform university ("Little Harvard on Lake Constance"). Kambartel had close ties to the Erlangen School of constructivist philosophy of science. He taught in Frankfurt am Main from 1993 until his retirement in 2000. He died on April 25, 2022, in Constance.

Kambartel's main research areas are the philosophy of language, the philosophy of the natural sciences, and the philosophy of mind. However, he also contributed to logic, action theory, ethics and the philosophy of economics.

His most important works are the habilitation thesis Erfahrung und Struktur ("Experience and Structure"), published by Suhrkamp in 1968, as well as the three anthologies Theorie und Begründung (1978, "Theory and Justification"), Philosophie der humanen Welt (1989, "Philosophy of the Human World") and Philosophie und Politische Ökonomie (1998, "Philosophy and Political Economics").

Kambartel's philosophical work is wide-ranging and manifold. Yet two major tenets are present throughout — on the one hand the primacy of practical reason (his "pragmatism"), and on the other the conception of reason as culture ("his anti-formalism").

The first tenet shapes his contributions to the philosophies of science, mind, and action. If action and practical reason were granted primacy over thinking and theoretical reason, and if the latter were only possible on the basis of the former, then results obtained by neuroscience, for example, could never show that man is determined after all and cannot really act freely.

The second tenet does not emerge clearly until his later work, and then it also marks a distance to the constructive attempts of the Erlangen School. Reason was not to be understood exactly, e.g. to be defined as a principle or criterion. Reason was rather a culture you grow into, a social practice within which you cultivate your judgment. Conceptual judgments like Kant’s formula of man as an end in itself served as comments to parts of the "grammar" of this culture.