K.-O. APEL’s TRANSCENDENTAL SEMIOTICS AS A MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Abstract

K.-O. Apel’s transcendental semiotics covers both transcendental pragmatics of language and transcendental hermeneutics. This presupposes an in-depth elaboration of the traditional prob- lems of philosophy related to the metaphysics of natural evolution and mentalist epistemology, that is the problems of being, morality, and truth. K.-O. Apel’s approach is the embodiment of one of the important tendencies of our time, namely the return to substantiation as opposed to such postmodernist tendency, as the ironic overthrow of age-old philosophical ideals. All the works by K.-O. Apel are connected with transcendental semiotics, or, in other words, transcen- dental pragmatics and philosophy of language. Thus, he proposes a way to transform transcen- dental philosophy in the plane of the philosophy of language, the main result of which should be an analysis of thinking in terms of language use, and therefore in terms of transcendental prag- matics. The subject of the study of language pragmatics is the analysis of the use of language in everyday communication between people.

According to Apel, the involvement of pragmatics as a methodological basis of philosophy makes it possible to solve many problems facing modern philosophy, first of all to overcome the traditional solipsism of transcendental philosophy of consciousness, to propose a substantiation for the principle of intersubjectivity and so on. At the same time, pragmatics as a heuristic ap- proach makes it possible to make the object of philosophical analysis any sphere of human com- munication, including social and ethical relations.