Vittorio Hösle

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'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.

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.

In 1982 Hösle completed his doctorate in philosophy (with a thesis titled Wahrheit und Geschichte. Studien zur Struktur der Philosophiegeschichte unter paradigmatischer Analyse der Entwicklung von Parmenides bis Platon) at age of 21, and earned his habilitation in philosophy in 1986 (with a thesis titled Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität: Untersuchungen zu Hegels System, {Subjectivity and Inter-subjectivity: Investigations of Hegel's System}) at the age of 25, both from the University of Tübingen. Because of his speed in accomplishing these feats, he was called a "Wunderkind" and "the Boris Becker of philosophy,".

Vittorio Hösle (German: [ˈhøːslə]; born 25 June 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) (The Philosophical Dialogue).

Hösle believes that his approach runs counter to the dominant trends of Western philosophy following the rise of post-Hegelian philosophy in the 1830s, and especially amid "that ultra-critical thinking which…has swept over Europe like a great wave" beginning in the 1960s. A useful introduction to the many grounds on which Hösle criticizes the often-unchallenged relativistic assumptions of our time is provided in "Foundational Issues of Objective Idealism," the opening essay of Objective Idealism, Ethics and Politics (1998). He establishes his positive position largely through reflexive or transcendental reasoning—that is, reflections upon the necessary presuppositions of all reason and speech. While the theoretical alternative Hösle provides is largely Platonic and Hegelian, his practical philosophy could be described as a modified Kantianism, and is developed in the same volume's second essay: "The Greatness and Limits of Kant's Practical Philosophy." There Hösle argues that the autonomous, rationalist, and universalist positions of Kant, based on the synthetic a priori, remain unsurpassed and indispensable achievements. However, Hösle does grant that Kant was mistaken in neglecting the need to cultivate the emotions, as well as in his overly formalist approach, which neglects the need for concrete knowledge of circumstances and wrongly denies the possibility of morally compelling exceptions to objective moral rules.