Karl-Otto Apel (born in Düsseldorf) is an influential post-World War II German philosopher responsible for creatively introducing analytic linguistic philosophy to the German philosophical tradition. He fought in the German army on the eastern front and, in fact, began his university studies while a prisoner-of-war in France. He completed his doctoral dissertation on Martin Heidegger in Bonn in 1950, wrote his Habilitation ("The Idea of Language in the Tradition from Dante to Vico") in Mainz in 1960, and, after several years teaching at the Universities of Kiel and Saarbrücken, spent the rest of his academic career at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (where Jürgen Habermas, whom he had known since his student years in Bonn, was his colleague). He is best known for his development of transcendental semiotics that, as a first philosophy distinct from both traditional metaphysics and a modern...