Andreas Dorschel
Andreas Dorschel (born 1962) is a German philosopher. Since 2002, he has been professor of aesthetics and head of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of the Arts Graz (Austria).
Andreas Dorschel
1962 (age 61–62)
Background[edit]
Andreas Dorschel was born in 1962 in Wiesbaden, West Germany. He is a cousin of the modernist visual artist Gesine Probst-Bösch (Weimar 1944–1994 Munich).[1] From 1983 on, Dorschel studied philosophy, musicology and linguistics at the universities of Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) (MA 1987, PhD 1991). In 2002, the University of Bern (Switzerland) awarded him the Habilitation degree (post-doctoral lecturing qualification). Dorschel has taught at universities in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the UK.[2] At University of East Anglia Norwich (UK), he was a colleague of writer W.G. Sebald.[3] Dorschel was Visiting Professor at Emory University (1995) and at Stanford University (2006).[4] On Dorschel’s initiative, the Graz Institute for Music Aesthetics received its name in 2007.[5] Between 2008 and 2017, Dorschel was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF);[6] from 2012 to 2017 he joined the Review Panel of the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) Joint Research Programme of the European Science Foundation (ESF) (Strasbourg / Brussels).[7] From 2010 on, he has been on the Advisory Board of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) Music and Philosophy Study Group.[8] In his philosophical explorations of music, he closely exchanged ideas with British aesthetician Roger Scruton (1944–2020).[9] In 2019, Andreas Dorschel was elected member of the Academia Europaea.[10] During the academic year 2020/21, he was a Fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.[11]
Retrieving philosophical genres[edit]
Dorschel has taken a critical stance towards a blinkered academicism in philosophy.[50] He considers the narrowing-down of philosophical writing to articles and monographs a drain especially on epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. The now conventional forms of exposition leave little room for presenting a position while, as the argument develops, keeping various degrees of distance from the position presented. To that purpose, tapping richer resources of (dramatic and epic) irony as well as a heuristic of fiction, Dorschel has revived a number of genres such as the letter, dialogue, monologue and philosophical tale (‘conte philosophique’) that had flourished during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,[51] but fell out of favour with modern academic philosophers.[52] Ten of Dorschel’s dialogues, with an introduction to the philosophy of dialogue, were published in 2021 under the title Wortwechsel (literally: exchange of words).