...at 3:16 AM. I thought this was interesting, about his road into philosophy and the situation in Austria after WWII:
Still at school I had the chance to attend the annual European Forum at Alpbach, a village in the Austrian Tyrol near my home town. There I met Hans Albert, Karl-Otto Apel, Paul Feyerabend, Walter Kaufmann and Herbert Marcuse amongst others.
It was the mid sixties of the last century, I hated the confinements of my high school, the Ex-Nazi teachers, and I couldn’t wait for these three weeks of intellectual challenge to arrive in late summer. I was excited by the atmosphere of Alpbach and it was there, where I decided to put my life on philosophy.
Academic philosophy in Austria back then was hardly attractive. Twenty years after the war the scene in Vienna was dominated by a transcendental philosophy whose Post-Nazi-representatives had prevented the return of the exiled philosophers of the “Vienna Circle”.
I chose to study sociology at the newly founded University of Linz, the only one in Austria without a philosophy department. Eventually I took up philosophy at Graz University, where Rudolf Haller established a first centre of Analytical Philosophy in the German language countries. There I was able to meet Peter Winch, Stephan Körner, Brian McGuinness, John Findlay, Chaim Perelman, Gershon Weiler, Arthur Danto, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson and Ferrucio Rossi-Landi amongst others.
The seventies were the heydays of the Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik in former Yugoslavia, where I participated in courses with Dagfinn Follesdal, Bill Newton-Smith and Jonathan Barnes and had the chance to attend conferences of the Volkswagen Foundation with Michael Dummett, W.V.O. Quine and Bernhard Waldenfels.
When my first attempts to elaborate and discuss my philosophical ideas met with incomprehension and massive rejection I went to Berkeley hoping Paul Feyerabend would give me the encouragement to continue – which he did. Being there I did not miss out on Paul Grice and John Searle.
Eventually I got a PhD from the University of Graz. Perhaps I should mention that in those days the curriculum in Austria was extremely liberal and allowed for obtaining a PhD with very few formal obligations except for the dissertation.
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