Vittorio Hösle
| Vittorio Hösle | |
|---|---|
| Born |
25 June 1960 Milan, Italy |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School |
Continental philosophy Objective idealism |
|
Main interests
|
Practical philosophy |
Vittorio Hösle (German: [ˈhøːslə]; born June 25, 1960) is an Italian-born German philosopher. He has authored works including Hegels System (1987), Moral und Politik (1997, trans. as Morals and Politics, 2004), and Der philosophische Dialog (2006).
He has been in the United States since 1999, at the University of Notre Dame where he is the Paul Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters (with concurrent appointments in the Departments of German, Philosophy, and Political Science). Since 2008, he has also served as the founding Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.
Hösle completed his doctorate in philosophy about the "Hegels System" at age of 21, and earned his Habilitation at the age of 25, both from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Because of his speed in accomplishing these feats, he was called a “Wunderkind” and “the Boris Becker of philosophy,”.
As of July 2009, Hösle has written or edited 32 books (in at least 16 languages), and written over 125 articles. In Europe he has become “something of a celebrity, the subject of two documentaries shown on TV stations throughout Europe and even Korea.” On 6 August 2013 Pope Francis appointed him ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
Hösle personally estimates that he, conservatively, can communicate in at least seventeen different languages, listing German, Italian, English, Spanish, Russian, Norwegian, and French; passive knowledge of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Pali, Avestan, Portuguese, Catalan, Modern Greek, Swedish, and Danish.”
Hösle’s magnum opus is his approximately 1,000 page Morals and Politics (trans. 2004). In it, he claims to present “a comprehensive vision of all the knowledge needed to answer the difficult question of what constitutes moral policies in the various fields of politics such as foreign policy, domestic policy, economics, ecology and such.” To do so it offers a normative foundation of the relation between ethics and politics, a descriptive theory of the objects of political philosophy (including anthropology, sociobiology, the virtues, the principles of power, and the theory of the states), from both of which premises he derives “a concrete political ethics” appropriate for the twenty-first century.
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