Hans Albert - The Intellectual Life of Hans Albert

The Intellectual Life of Hans Albert

In 1950 Hans Albert earned his first degree as a 'Diplom-Kaufmann', followed by an Academic degree of a Dr. rer.pol. 1952. In the years 1952–1958 he worked as an assistant at the 'Forschungsinstitut für Sozial- und Verwaltungswissenschaften' of the University of Cologne. In 1957 he got the degree of a 'Dr. habil. for Social Politics' at the University of Cologne. As a lecturer he read logic, theory of science and economics of the welfare state. Since 1958 he has been participating the Alpbacher Hochschulwochen (a famous summer conference in the beautiful Austrian alpine village of Alpbach). It was there he made the acquaintance of Karl Popper after having studied Popper's philosophy and having mostly accepted it long ago. After 1955 he had exciting discussions with Paul Feyerabend, who in those times was a critical rationalist and an admirer of Karl Popper. Their letters later were published. In 1963 Albert finally got the chair of 'Social Sciences and General Studies of Methods' (later dubbed 'Sociology and Studies of Economics') at the Wirtschaftshochschule Mannheim (later University of Mannheim).

1961–1969 was the time of the so called 'Positivismusstreit' (positivism dispute), i.e. the debate between Karl Popper and Theodor W. Adorno concerning positivism within German sociology during the 1960s. Albert participated at this meanwhile famous Conference of the German Society of Sociology ('Tagung der deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie') 1961 in Tübingen. In the beginning there was no dispute on positivism, because Adorno as well as Popper were opposed to positivism. The debate was more about the differences between social sciences and natural sciences and the status of values in the social sciences. 1963 The debate was continued by Jürgen Habermas in the Festschrift für Adorno. 1964 On the Soziologentag (conference on sociology) in Heidelberg the debate grew up into an excited discussion between Habermas and Albert. The famous dispute culminated in a collection of essays published in 1969, translated into several languages, also into English (1976, see booklist below). This dispute gained a broad audience.

In 1989 Hans Albert was discharged from active service as Professor Emeritus but continued writing books and giving lectures at many universities, such as the 1990 lectures at the University of Graz on Critical Rationalism, the 1995 'Walter Adolf Lectures' at the Hochschule St. Gallen, and the 1998 Wittgenstein-Lectures at the University of Bayreuth (with Prof. Rainer Hegselmann) about Critical Rationalism.

He was honored with the 'Vits prize' 1976 and with the 'Arthur Burckhard prize' 1984. He was decorated with the Austrian 'Ehrenkreuz für Kunst und Wissenschaft der Republik Österreich' (1994) and got honorary doctorates of the universities of Linz/Austria (1995), Athens/Greece (1997), Kassel/Germany (2000), Graz/Austria (2006), and Klagenfurt/Austria (2007).