Hans-Herbert Kögler

Hans-Herbert Kögler (born January 13, 1960) is a German-American philosopher.

Biography Kögler was born in Darmstadt in 1960. After finishing the in his home city, he studied philosophy, history of art, and sociology of education at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He received a German National Scholarship Foundation Fellowship for his doctoral studies, as well as a one-year award for study in the United States, visiting Thomas A. McCarthy at the Northwestern University, Richard J. Bernstein at The New School for Social Research, and Hubert Dreyfus at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed both his master's dissertation in 1986 and his doctoral dissertation in 1991 under the supervision of Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt.

He returned to the US and began his teaching career in 1991—first as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. He received two National Endowment for the Humanities faculty fellowships (Boston University 1997, University of Arizona in Tucson 2000). In 2007/2008 he became the UNF Philosophy Department chair (until 2015) and full professor. He maintained academic contacts with Europe, in particular with the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, where he has taught as a visiting professor (2004; 2006, 2010, since 2014 regularly), and with Prague (visiting position 2003).

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.