Starting from the hypothesis that language and communication play an important role in the coordination of actions of individuals, Habermas developed his program of ‘universal pragmatics’. The connection between this idea of universal pragmatics with sociological theory, Habermas elaborated in critical discussions with sociologists like Weber, Durkheim, Parsons and early critical theory, in his voluminous Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981). Habermas (1992) is an effort to make the insights of his 1981 work fruitful in the context of the theory and philosophy of law. The origins of the thought of Karl-Otto Apel, the proponent of a ‘transcendental pragmatics’, do not lie in critical theory, but in the work and influence of Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who is normally regarded as standing in sharp opposition to critical theory. Later Apel tried to make use of his paradigm in the field of the explanation of action and the philosophical foundations of the humanities (Apel 1979), but most of his efforts concentrated on the foundations of ethics where he developed (together with Habermas) a ‘Diskursethik’ (discursive ethics) (Apel 1988; Habermas 1983). Habermas and Apel roughly share the same paradigm. Relying on this close kinship, the further elucidations of universal and transcendental pragmatics in this paper take Habermas’ thought as starting-point, letting aside the more biographical question of in which manner these two thinkers influenced one another.