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).

[12] Hösle states that his greatest concern is that "in the historical cataclysms that face us, we will abandon not the self-destructive aspects of modernity, but rather precisely its universalism.

"[13] Hösle believes that Carl Schmitt, like Friedrich Nietzsche before him and the related movement of National Socialism, all illustrate the "artificial atavism" of those who attempt to repudiate universalist ideas after their historical discovery.

Such repudiations result in raw power-positivism, rather than the naïve identification with traditional, pre-modern culture which is the surface intention of such "counter-enlightenment" theories.

He also argues that the foundation of the worldview which supports human rights is "eroding with increasing speed," and therefore the political cataclysms of the twentieth century are by no means "merely superficial phenomena that ultimately belong to the past.

[16] He argues that an excessive focus on economic growth and ever-expanding consumption has increased perceived needs more quickly than it can meet them,[17] which leads to self-absorption and lovelessness,[18] and a demand for more resources ecologically than can be sustained for future generations or universalized to all the people of the world.

There Hösle argues that the autonomous, rationalist, and universalist positions of Kant, based on the synthetic a priori, remain unsurpassed and indispensable achievements.