[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).

[13] In Die idealistische Kritik des Willens [German Idealism's Critique of the Will] (1992) Dorschel defends an understanding of freedom as choice against Kant's and Hegel's ethical animadversions.

"Dorschel wants to subvert that controversy by way of refuting an assumption shared by both parties" ("Dorschel will diesen Streit unterlaufen, indem er eine von beiden geteilte Annahme widerlegt"),[21] to wit, that prejudices are bad or good, false or true because they are prejudices.

[22] As Richard Raatzsch puts it, Dorschel "seeks out the common source of both parties' errors through rendering each position as strong as possible" ("den gemeinsamen Quellen der Irrtümer beider Seiten nachgeht, indem er sie so plausibel wie möglich zu machen sucht").

[24] The conclusion's significance derives from the fact that it is part and parcel of "an account which preserves something of the common-sense notion of prejudice, rather than an abstract list of necessary and sufficient conditions that risks neglecting what people have historically meant and continue to mean by the term.

"[25] In Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren [Design – The Aesthetics of Useful Things] (2002), Dorschel probes different ways of assessing artefacts.

[26] He "observed that 'the concepts of the useful and [of] purpose have been replaced in the philosophy of design by that of function'", Ute Poerschke states in a dense summary of the monograph.

"[28] Gestaltung – Zur Ästhetik des Brauchbaren, according to Christian Demand, features "a systematic philosophy of design that does not settle for mere propaedeutics".

Dorschel highlights this idea, setting forth – in four case studies – the character of metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman mythology, in the New Testament,[33] in modern alchemy, and, finally, in current genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

[39] It has been considered “one of the strengths of Dorschel’s monograph”[40] to overcome Quentin Skinner's constricting doctrine that ideas are “essentially linguistic”.

[41] Dorschel asserts: “Words are just one medium of ideas among others; musicians conceive their products in tones, architects in spaces, painters in form and colour, mathematicians in numbers or, on a more abstract level, in functions” (“Worte sind nur ein Medium von Ideen unter anderen; Musiker denken in Tönen, Architekten in Räumen, Maler in Formen und Farben, Mathematiker in Zahlen oder, abstrakter, in Funktionen.”).

[43] In his 2022 monograph Mit Entsetzen Scherz (Trifling with Despair), Andreas Dorschel starts from the historical observation that the concepts of ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’, since they had been first put forward in the 5th c. BC, were seen as opposed to each other.

[46] To appear comic is a matter of the moment, he argues, while what is tragic manifests itself in “a grand arc” (“eine[m] großen Bogen”).

[47] From this general tenet, Dorschel unfolds a poetics of the tragicomic incident in works from ancient Greece through renaissance England to modern Austria, employing the categories ‘irony’,[48] ‘intervention’[49] and ‘travesty’.