Fred Dallmayr

Fred Reinhard Dallmayr (born October 18, 1928) is an American philosopher and political theorist.

He is Packey J. Dee Professor Emeritus in Political Science with a joint appointment in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame (US).

He holds a Doctor of Law from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and a PhD in political science from Duke University.

He is the author of some 40 books and the editor of 20 other books.

He has served as president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP); an advisory member of the scientific committee of RESET – Dialogue on Civilizations (Rome); the executive co-chair of World Public Forum – Dialogue of Civilizations (Vienna), and a member of the supervisory board of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute (Berlin).

Dallmayr was born on October 18, 1928, in Ulm, Germany, and raised in Augsburg, Germany.

World War II had a profound impact on his intellectual and political development.

In 1954–1957, he attended the Institute of European Studies (Istituto Universitario di Studi Europei) in Turin, Italy, under the mentorship of Norberto Bobbio.

“I feel that, in large measure, I can trace my persistent opposition to war and violence—especially aggressive warfare—to this youthful experience.” In 1955, he received the degree of Doctor of Law from the University of Munich.

In 1955–1956, he studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, US.

In 1957, he was admitted to Duke University, North Carolina, US, taking the PhD in political science in 1960.

He taught at Purdue University as an assistant professor and associate professor (1963–1971), and then as professor and head of department of political science (1973–1978).

He has been a visiting professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany (1971–72, 1976, and 1986).

Since 1978, he has taught at Notre Dame, and is currently Packey J. Dee Professor of Government emeritus.

He has also been Werner Marx Visiting Professor in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York (1988), a Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and a Fulbright research scholar, at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU), Vadodara, Gujarat, India (1991–1992).

During trips to India, China, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, Egypt, and other countries, he established close collaborative relationships with many prominent philosophers and has been able to learn in-depth their cultural and philosophical traditions.

He has maintained dialogues with philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, as well as Karl-Otto Apel, William McBride, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Marion Young, David M. Rasmussen, Judith Butler, Bhikhu Parekh, Ashis Nandy, and Tu Weiming, among others.

Dallmayr's research interests include contemporary philosophy and political theory; especially phenomenology; hermeneutics; critical theory; deconstruction; democratic theory; intercultural philosophy; and non-Western philosophical and political thought.

He has written on G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor W. Adorno; Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Louis Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Paul Tillich, Raimon Panikkar, and Enrique Dussel.

Dallmayr's philosophy is characterized by the transformative impulse, fostering both the change that takes place in the development of philosophy and the role of philosophy in understanding and transforming human beings in their cultural manifestations and in social interactions.

Dallmayr's philosophy and political theory favors self-other relations over ego, dialogue over monologue, relationality over static identity, ethical conduct over the abstract knowledge of normative rules, equal democratic lateral relationships over hierarchies of domination, and intercultural and cosmopolitan perspectives over chauvinistic hegemonism.

He has been a critic of liberal democracy, and has elucidated alternative conceptions of “apophatic” democracy or “democracy to come.”

As an alternative to the dichotomies of Western philosophy, Dallmayr's overall perspective aims to steer a course between universalism and particularism, between globalism and localism, between Western modernity and tradition, and between Western and non-Western traditions of philosophical and religious thought.

He firmly upholds the transcendent or trans-mundane status of the ideas of truth, goodness and justice, while simultaneously insisting on the need to interpret these ideas and to translate them into a commitment to justice and peace among people in this world.

In developing his philosophy, Dallmayr acknowledges his debt to phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstructionism.

From his earliest works, Dallmayr has consistently confronted Cartesian cogito and its oppositions (subject and object, human being and world).

He criticizes the egocentrism of modern Western thought, including its “anthropocentric and subjectivist thrust” and “possessive individualism.” Yet this critique does not mean anti-humanism and the “end of man,” as advocated by some postmodern thinkers.

He does not disregard the individual subject, but rather revises it as an emergent and relational being capable of transformation.

To the metaphysical paradigm rooted in individual subjectivity he opposes the emerging outlook emphasizing human connectedness, anchored in (Heideggerian) “care” (Sorge) and “solicitude” (Fürsorge).

Dallmayr outlines a post-individualist theory of politics, which does not simply reject individualism but seeks to divest it of its anthropocentric, “egological,” and “possessive” connotations.

Dieter Misgeld noted that Dallmayr has “a post-individualist theory of politics and post-liberal moral and political thinking as his themes, as well as a theory of embodied intersubjectivity meant to be foundational for a theory of politics.”

Dallmayr's brings an original interpretation of Heidegger's works.

He was among the first in the English-speaking world to realize that Heidegger's philosophical work “was much broader than the particular Nazi episode.” He has elucidated Heidegger's work in several of his own major works.

He uncovered fruitful contributions of Heidegger's work, which are relevant to contemporary social and political thought.

He also delineated the contours of an alternative political perspective in Heidegger's thought.

Dallmayr highlights the importance of Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics, especially Cartesian rationalism with its focus on the cogito, which was the root of the split between mind and matter, subject and object, self and other, humans and the world.

In contrast to these divisions, Heidegger's definition of human existence as being-in-the-world conceptualizes “world” in its many dimensions as a constitutive feature of existence as such.

In opposition to traditional formulations, being could not be grasped as a substance or fixed concept but needs to be seen as a temporal process or happening, an ongoing disclosure (and sheltering) of meaning in which all beings participate.

With Heidegger, Dallmayr goes beyond the self-centered type of existentialism.

He interprets Dasein (human existence) in Being and Time as not a self-constituted or a fixed substance, but open-ended and potentially transformative, “a being moved by ‘care’ (Sorge) in an ongoing search for meaning and truth.”