Albert's Style of Writing and Criticizing
Albert's plea is for critical rationalism. He avoids solemn preaching in favor of serious, serene discussion with people of different faith and thinking. While Popper always warned not to follow one's opponent into the mire, Albert follows them into their favored field of thinking on their own terms. So he criticized Heidegger's "being in the abyss" ("Sein im Ab-Grund"), Gadamer's "horizons melting together", Habermas's "consensual theoretical truth in the ideal discourse", Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental arguments, the theologian Hans Küng's "absolute-relative, this-life-and-hereafter, transcendental-immanent, allconcerning-allcontrolling most real reality in the very heart of things". Hans Albert meticulously follows their arguments to uncover:
- undiscovered premises
- new and often fatal consequences
- new and often better alternatives.
Underlying suppositions and injunctions of Albert's method are:
- Only if all alternatives to critical rationalism are untenable may one live with critical rationalism.
- There is value in keeping an open mind and learning from discussion. Other people may be right; thus give credit to their thinking.
- One should keep away from solemn gravity.
- One should avoid the moralising know-it-all but not conceal one's preferred way of life.
Read more about this topic: Hans Albert
Famous quotes containing the words style, writing and/or criticizing:
“Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well-proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)