Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory.
Norbert Elias was a Jewish German sociologist who later became a British citizen. He is especially famous for his theory of civilizing/decivilizing processes.
Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He co-hosted the German television show Das Philosophische Quartett from 2002 until 2012.
Nico Stehr was "Karl Mannheim Professor for Cultural Studies" at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen / Germany and Founding Director of the European Center for Sustainability Research.
Otfried Höffe is a German philosopher and professor.
Geisteswissenschaften is a set of human sciences such as philosophy, history, philology, musicology, linguistics, theater studies, literary studies, media studies, religious studies and sometimes even jurisprudence, that are traditional in German universities. Most of its subject matter would come under Humanities in the typical English-speaking university.
Hans Lenk was a German rower who competed for the United Team of Germany in the 1960 Summer Olympics, and an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. He was born in Berlin.
Uta Gerhardt is a German sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of Heidelberg. She studied sociology, philosophy and history at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. In 1969, she obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Konstanz. The focus of her work is on medical sociology, structural-functionalist role theory, and general sociological theory. She also wrote a major biography of Talcott Parsons.
Ingo Mörth is an Austrian sociologist.
K. Ludwig Pfeiffer is a German scholar in literary, media and cultural studies. Besides his own publications, he is the editor and co-editor of 14 volumes in various research disciplines. He has also published about 150 scholarly articles on important topics in the humanities.
The works of the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas include books, papers, contributions to journals, periodicals, newspapers, lectures given at conferences and seminars, reviews of works by other authors, and dialogues and speeches given in various occasions. Working in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. Habermas is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics—particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.
Hermann Vetter is a German academic and translator who has made many works of English-language philosophy available in German. He specialized in sociology of knowledge and social psychology. His academic career was interrupted by the "student revolutions" of the 1960s.
Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha is a Scottish sociologist and cultural scientist, working in Germany.
Peter Weingart is a German professor emeritus in sociology and former director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld.
Heinrich Popitz was a German sociologist who worked towards a general sociological theory. Alongside thinkers like Helmut Schelsky, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Dieter Claessens, and others he was one of those sociologists in post-war Germany who founded their sociological reflections on insights from Philosophical Anthropology, thus creating an alternative to the then dominant paradigms of the Frankfurt School and Cologne School. His work revolves around the four central concepts power, norms, technology, and creativity.
Maik Hosang is a German philosopher, future researcher and human ecologist.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is an historian of science who comes from Liechtenstein. He was director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 1997 to 2014. His focus areas within the history of science are the history and epistemology of the experiment, and further the history of molecular biology and protein biosynthesis. Additionally he writes and publicizes essays and poems.
Peter Wicke is a German musicologist, who is particularly interested in popular music; he teaches as a university professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Peter Václav Zima is a literary critic and a social scientist born in Prague 1946. He is of Czech-German origin and has dual nationality such as Austrian and Dutch. He is emeritus professor of the Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt (Austria) where he held the chair of General and Comparative Literature from 1983 to 2012.
Critique and Crisis is the title of the dissertation by the historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) from 1954 at the University of Heidelberg. In the 1959 book edition, it was initially subtitled A contribution to the pathogenesis of the bourgeois world, and later A study on the pathogenesis of the bourgeois world. In this work, Koselleck subjected the Enlightenment and its philosophy of history to a critical appraisal influenced by the authoritarian idea of the state of his early mentor Carl Schmitt. With this, he intended to expose the (seemingly) humanistic-universal theorems of the Enlightenment as "hypocritical" fighting concepts. In misjudging the peace function of the absolutist state in the religious wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, they had undermined its foundations. The elites of the bourgeoisie, who had risen under the protection of absolutism, had triggered a state crisis with their enlightening criticism, which ultimately led to the French Revolution. The widespread attention that the book received can be seen from the multiple reprints and the numerous translations.
