Andreas Dorschel

He is a cousin of the modernist visual artist Gesine Probst-Bösch (Weimar 1944–1994 Munich).

In his philosophical explorations of music, he closely exchanged ideas with British aesthetician Roger Scruton (1944–2020).

Andreas Dorschel (born 1962) is a German philosopher.

Andreas Dorschel was born in 1962 in Wiesbaden, West Germany.

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 Die idealistische Kritik des Willens [German Idealism’s Critique of the Will] (1992) Dorschel defends an understanding of freedom as choice against Kant’s and 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.

Unlike other critics of idealism, Dorschel does not endorse determinism.

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.

Dorschel was Visiting Professor at Emory University (1995) and at Stanford University (2006).

Rethinking Prejudice (2000, reissued 2019) examines the Enlightenment’s struggle against prejudices and the Counter-Enlightenment’s partisanship in favour of them.

“Dorschel wants to subvert that controversy by way of refuting an assumption shared by both parties” (“Dorschel will diesen Streit unterlaufen, indem er eine von beiden geteilte Annahme widerlegt”), to wit, that prejudices are bad or good, false or true because they are prejudices.

As Richard Raatzsch puts it, Dorschel “seeks out the common source of both parties’ errors through rendering each position as strong as possible” (“den gemeinsamen Quellen der Irrtümer beider Seiten nachgeht, indem er sie so plausibel wie möglich zu machen sucht”).

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.”

Since 2002, he has been professor of aesthetics and head of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of the Arts Graz (Austria).

In 2002, the University of Bern (Switzerland) awarded him the Habilitation degree (post-doctoral lecturing qualification).

Dorschel has taught at universities in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the UK.

At University of East Anglia Norwich (UK), he was a colleague of writer W.G. Sebald.

In Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren [Design – The Aesthetics of Useful Things] (2002), Dorschel probes different ways of assessing artefacts.

He “observed that ‘the concepts of the useful and [of] purpose have been replaced in the philosophy of design by that of function’”, Ute Poerschke states in a dense summary of the monograph.

‘Function’ seemed to maintain the 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’.

Dorschel criticized that function has a diffuse meaning, under which one could understand both purpose and technology and concluded that because of this diffuse meaning it is advisable to consider ‘not function, as modern functionalism did, but rather purpose and technology as the basic concepts of a theory of design’.” Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren, according to Christian Demand, features “a systematic philosophy of design that does not settle for mere propaedeutics”.

Ludwig Hasler characterizes Dorschel’s book as a “cure via argumentative precision” (“argumentative Präzisionskur”), setting up “a controversy [...] both with modern functionalism, the movement that revolutionized design for a century, and with postmodernism, that sportive celebration of whimsy in matters of form” (“eine Streitschrift […] gegen den Funktionalismus der Moderne, der ein Jahrhundert lang die Gestaltung der Gebrauchsdinge revolutionierte, wie gegen die Postmoderne, die sich auf den Spass an der Beliebigkeit der Formen kaprizierte”).

Dorschel’s ''Verwandlung.

Mythologische Ansichten, technologische Absichten [Mutation.

On Dorschel’s initiative, the Graz Institute for Music Aesthetics received its name in 2007.

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.

During the academic year 2020/21, he was a Fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

In his philosophical studies, Dorschel explores, both in a systematic and historical vein, the interconnectedness of thought and action.

His work has been influenced by philosophers Denis Diderot, Arthur Schopenhauer and R. G. Collingwood.