Fundamentação do conhecimento na contemporaneidade: confrontação entre Apel e Puntel

Abstract

The present study confronts the thinking of the German philosophers Karl-Otto Apel and Lorenz Bruno Puntel regarding the question of the foundation in knowledge. The general purpose of this issue is both, to show the relevance and complexity of the theme with reference to the foundation in the philosophical proposal of each of the authors, as to show which of them offers the theory in the most adequate foundation for the present days. In order to achieve this aim, an analysis of the thinking from each author was first carried out, mainly explaining the conception of the aforesaid foundations in the knowledge incorporated by each of them. Furthermore, confrontations were carried out somehow relevant to the question of reasoning, between some general aspects and some related to the place and the role of the language in the philosophies proposed by the said authors. Therefore, confrontations were made between aspects of the coherent view in the foundation defended by Puntel and the foundationalist vision duly defended by Apel. This philosophical research was mainly done by analyzing texts, collating texts in German and secondarily by means of oral philosophical discussions. The conclusion reached by the present study is that both, the proposal for the foundation of knowledge developed by Apel and that developed by Puntel are complex and relevant proposals that available today, are able to argue with the skeptics and show that it is possible that a foundation of knowledge would escape from incoherent radical relativism. In spite of the affirmative answer from both authors, regarding the overcoming of the skeptics, their strategies differ significantly, thus, the second conclusion can be reached through the theory in the foundation proposed by the systematic-structural, being more adequate than the proposed theory by the pragmatic-transcendental, since the systematic basis present in the structural-systematics is capable of covering the basis of the transcendental pragmatics, making it valid within its specific theoretical framework which is worse than Puntel´s theoretical framework and given that Apel, unlike Puntel, is not explicit in the assumptions, according to which he articulates his thoughts in a way that he performs an undisciplined reflection under this aspect. Hence, as a less important motivation, we have the fact that in the systematic-structural philosophy, a foundation is made allowing to identify a graduality in the status of “grounded”, whereby a theory can be received, making this approach richer and a more flexible approach than the concurrent approach that generates only true or false results altogether.