PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

discipline that seeks to unify the several empirical investigations of human nature in an effort to understand individuals as both creatures of their environment and creators of their own values. The word anthropology was first used in the philosophical faculties of German universities at the end of the 16th century to refer to the systematic study of man as a physical and moral being. Philosophical anthropology is thus, literally, the systematic study of man conducted within philosophy or by the reflective methods characteristic of philosophy; it might in particular be thought of as being concerned with questions of the status of man in the universe, of the purpose or meaning of human life, and, indeed, with the issues of whether there is any such meaning and of whether man can be made an object of systematic study. What actually falls under the term philosophical anthropology, however, varies with conceptions of the nature and scope of philosophy. The fact that such disciplines as physics, chemistry, and biology-which are now classified as natural sciences-were until the 19th century all branches of natural philosophy serves as a reminder that conceptions of philosophy have changed. Twentieth-century readings of philosophical anthropology are much narrower than those of previous centuries. Four possible meanings are now accepted: (1) the account of man that is contained in any comprehensive philosophy; (2) a particular philosophical orientation known as humanism (see humanism), in which the study of man provides the foundation for all else-a position that has been prominent since the Renaissance; (3) a distinctive, 20th-century form of humanism that on occasion has claimed the label of "philosophical anthropology" for itself and that has taken the human condition, the personal being-in-the-world, as its starting point; and (4) any study of man that is regarded as unscientific. Philosophical anthropology has been used in the last sense by 20th-century antihumanists for whom it has become a term of abuse; antihumanists have insisted that if anthropology is to be possible at all it is possible only on the condition that it rejects the concept of the individual human subject. Humanism, in their eyes, yields only a prescientific, and hence a philosophical (or ideological), nonscientific anthropology. By tracing the development of the philosophy of man, it will thus be possible to deal, in turn, with the four meanings of philosophical anthropology. First, however, it is necessary to discuss the concept of human nature, which is central to any anthropology and to philosophical debates about the sense in which and the extent to which man can be made an object of systematic, scientific study. discipline that seeks to unify the several empirical investigations of human nature in an effort to understand individuals as both creatures of their environment and creators of their own values. Philosophical anthropology emerged as an academic discipline in Germany in the 1920s, after a time of increasing specialization in the human sciences. Scholars such as Helmuth Plessner, Max Scheler, and, earlier, Wilhelm Dilthey were concerned that the analysis of human nature through one narrow discipline (e.g., psychoanalysis, physical anthropology) would result in as many limited and deterministic views of humanity as there were empirical disciplines. Marxists, for example, saw economic forces as the only determinant of the human condition, while Freudians identified subconscious forces in that role. Philosophical anthropologists argued that human nature is complex and dynamic and is constantly able to rediscover and re-create itself within the confines of its biology and culture. Although established in reaction to scientific specialization, philosophical anthropology had its intellectual roots in the British empirical philosophers-especially Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume-and the great naturalists Carolus Linnaeus, the Count de Buffon, and Charles Darwin. In their studies of human nature, these men assumed no causal connections or final design in the phenomena they observed and admitted only those facts that could be proved by experience. Plessner and Scheler built on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl in an effort to begin scientific inquiry into human nature with the intuitive, personal consciousness of experience. Other philosophical anthropologists have borrowed from existentialism. Additional reading General works include Leslie Stevenson, Seven Theories of Human Nature (1974), which gives short introductory sketches of the views of Plato, Christian philosophers, Marx, Freud, Skinner, Sartre, and Lorenz; Bernard Groethuysen, Anthropologie philosophique (1953, reprinted 1980), a series of historical sketches of human personality from antiquity to the Renaissance; Michael Landmann, De Homine: Man in the Mirror of His Thought (1979; originally published in German, 1962), philosophical rather than anthropological; J.S. Slotkin (ed.), Readings in Early Anthropology (1965), a good selection of important historical texts, mainly of Anglo-Saxon thinkers; Georges Gusdorf, Les Sciences humaines et la pense occidentale (1966- ), a general history of the sciences of man on the basis of an anthropological philosophy-12 of 13 vol. had appeared to 1986; Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture (1944, reprinted 1974), a useful and accurate sketch; and A.L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory (1953, reissued 1965).On the history of the philosophy of man in the Western tradition, see Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC-AD 1250 (1985), which contains an excellent bibliography and numerous quotations from historical sources on human nature and the relation between male and female. Insights into the spirit of Renaissance thinking about man are given by Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. by Mario Domandi (1963, reissued 1972; originally published in German, 1927); and Dorothy Koenigsberger, Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking: A History of Concepts of Harmony, 1400-1700 (1979). The problems faced by 17th-century philosophers are outlined in Leroy E. Loemker, Struggle for Synthesis: The Seventeenth Century Background of Leibniz's Synthesis of Order and Freedom (1972). Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. by Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (1951, reissued 1979; originally published in German, 1932), provides a general discussion of the Enlightenment. On Hegel's philosophy and its impact, see Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (1979). A useful comparison of two very different 19th-century views of man and society is provided by Graeme Duncan, Marx and Mill (1973, reprinted 1977). Charles Coulston Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (1951, reissued 1959), discusses the impact of science on religious conceptions of man and his place in the order of nature in the decades before Darwin; and Mary Midgley, Beast and Man; The Roots of Human Nature (1978, reissued 1980).Post-Fregean, analytic philosophical thinking about man is conveyed in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language (1975, reprinted 1977); Amlie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons (1976); John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science (1984); and Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (1980). The controversy over whether linguistic ability is a distinctively human trait is discussed in Eugene Linden, Apes, Men and Language (1975, reprinted 1981); and Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind, enl. ed. (1972).Post-Hegelian philosophy that constitutes philosophical anthropology in the strict, third sense, together with reactions against it, is discussed in Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism (1986); and Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (1975, reprinted 1977). Works with the orientation characteristic of philosophical anthropology in this sense include Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958, reprinted 1974); Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. by W.R. Boyce Gibson (1931, reissued 1972; originally published in German, 1913); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962, reissued 1973; originally published in German, 7th ed., 1953); Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (1956, reissued 1978; originally published in French, 1943), and Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. by Alan Sheridan-Smith (1976, reissued 1982; originally published in French, 1960); M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (1962, reprinted 1981; originally published in French, 1945); and Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. by H.M. Parshley (1953, reprinted 1983; originally published in French, 2 vol., 1949).Opposition to this orientation can be found in, among others, Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966, reissued 1972; originally published in French, 1962), and Structural Anthropology, 2 vol. (1963-76; originally published in French, 1958-73); Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. by Ben Brewster (1969, reissued 1979; originally published in French, 1965); and Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (1977, reissued 1981; originally published in French, 1973). Georges Paul Gusdorf Mary Elizabeth Tiles