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:
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.
The concept of human nature is a common part of everyday thought.
The ordinary person feels that he comes to know human nature through
the character and conduct of the people he meets. Behind what they do
he recognizes qualities that often do not surprise him: he forms
expectations as to the sort of qualities possessed by other human
beings and about the ways they differ from, for example, dogs or
horses. People are proud, sensitive, eager for recognition or
admiration, often ambitious, hopeful or despondent, and selfish or
capable of self-sacrifice. They take satisfaction in their
achievements, have within them something called a conscience, and are
loyal or disloyal. Experience in dealing with and observing people
gives rise to a conception of a predictable range of conduct; conduct
falling outside the range that is considered not to be worthy of a
human is frequently regarded as inhuman or bestial whereas that which
is exceptional — in that it lives up to standards which most
people recognize but few achieve — is regarded as superhuman or
saintly.
The common conception of human nature thus implicitly locates man
on a scale of perfection, placing him somewhere above most animals but
below saints, prophets, or angels. This idea was embodied in the
theme, Hellenic in origin, of the Great Chain of Being — a
hierarchical order ascending from the most simple and inert to the
most complex and active: mineral, vegetable, animal, man, and finally
divine beings superior to man. In the Middle Ages these divine beings
constituted the various orders of angels, with God as the single,
supremely perfect and omnipotent, ever-active being. There was a
tendency in this theory to take for granted the commonality among all
human beings, something by virtue of which they could be classified as
fully human, which differentiates them from all other animals, and
which gives them their place in the order of things. Yet, as with many
notions that are habitually employed, the request for a precise
definition of "human nature" proves highly problematic.
The Greeks — most notably Plato and Aristotle —
introduced the notion of form, nature, or essence as an explanatory,
metaphysical concept. Variations on this concept were central to
Western thought until the 17th century. Observation of the natural
world raised the question of why creatures reproduced after their kind
and could not be interbred at will and of why, for example, acorns
grew into oaks and not into roses. To explain such phenomena it was
postulated that the seeds, whether plant or animal, must each already
contain within them the form, nature, or essence of the species from
which they were derived and into which they would subsequently
develop. This pattern of explanation is preserved in the modern
biological concept of a genetic code that is embodied in the DNA
molecular structure of each cell. There are important differences,
however, between the modern concept of a genetic code and the older,
Greek-derived concept of form or essence.
First, biologists are now able to locate, isolate, experimentally
analyze, and manipulate DNA molecules in what has become known as
genetic engineering. Being the structures responsible for physical
development, DNA molecules represent the terms by which man can be
biologically characterized. Forms or essences, on the other hand, were
not observable; if they were granted any independent existence, it was
as immaterial entities. The form, nature, or essence of man or of any
other kind of being was posited as a principle present in the thing,
determining its kind by producing in it an innate tendency to strive
to develop into a perfect example of itself — to fulfill its
nature and to realize its full potential as a thing of a given kind.
This gave rise to a teleological, or purposive, view of the natural
world in which developments were explained by reference to the goal
toward which each natural thing, by its nature, strives; i.e.
by reference to the ideal form it seeks to realize. By contrast, the
genetic structure present in each cell is now invoked to explain the
subsequent development of an organism in a "mechanistic" and
nonpurposive way, in which development is shown to be dependent upon
and determined by preexisting structures and conditions.
Second, genetic mutability forms an essential part of modern
evolutionary biology. Not only are there genetic differences between
individuals of a given species to account for differences between them
in features, such as coloration, but random genetic mutation in the
presence of changing environmental conditions may result in
alterations to the genetic constitution of the species as a whole.
Thus, in evolutionary biological theory species are not stable;
natural kinds do not have the fixed, immutable forms or essences
characteristic of biology before the advent of evolutionary theory.
Within either framework, if human nature is understood simply as
man's special form of that which is biologically inherited in all
species, there remains the delicate problem of discovering, in any
given case, exactly what role environment plays in determining the
actual characteristics of mature members of the species. Even in the
case of purely physiological characteristics this may be far from
straightforward: for example, the extent to which diet, exercise, and
conditions of work determine such things as susceptibility to heart
disease and cancer remains the subject of intensive scientific
investigation. In the case of behavioral and psychological
characteristics, such as intelligence, the problems are multiplied to
the point where they are no longer problems that can be answered by
purely empirical investigation. There is room for much conceptual
debate about what is meant by intelligence and over what tests, if
any, can be supposed to yield a direct measure of this capacity, and
thus provide evidence that an individual's level of intelligence is
determined at birth (by nature) rather than by subsequent exposure to
the environment (nurture) that conditions the development of all his
capacities.
This debate — whether the variation in intelligence levels is
a product of the conditions into which people all having the same
initial potential are born, or whether it is a reflection of
variations in the capacities with which they are born — is very
closely related to the question of whether there is such a thing as
human nature common to all human beings, or whether there are
intrinsic differences among those whom we recognize as belonging to
the biological species Homo sapiens. This is because, as the
name Homo sapiens suggests, man is traditionally thought to be
distinguished from and privileged above other animals by virtue of his
possession of reason, or intellect. When the intellect is positively
valued as that which is distinctively human and which confers
superiority on man, the thought that different races of people differ
by nature in their intellectual capacities has been used as a
justification for a variety of racist attitudes and policies. Those of
another race, of supposedly lesser intellectual development, are
classified as less than fully human and therefore as needing to be
accorded less than full human rights. Similarly, the thought that
women are by nature intellectually inferior to men has been used as a
justification for their domination by men, for refusing them
education, and even for according them the legal status of property
owned by men. On the other hand, if differences in adult intellectual
capacity are regarded as a product of the circumstances in which
potentially similar people are brought up, the attitude is to consider
all as equally human but some as having been more privileged when
growing up than others.
More radically, the evidence for variations in intelligence levels
may be questioned by challenging the objectivity of the standards
relative to which these levels are assessed. It may be argued that
conceptions of what constitutes a rational or intelligent response to
a situation or to a problem are themselves culturally conditioned, a
product of the way in which the members of the group devising the
tests and making the judgments have themselves been taught to think.
Such an argument has the effect of undermining claims by any one human
group to intellectual superiority over others, whether these others be
their contemporaries or their own forebears. Hence, they may also be
used to discredit any idea of a progressive development of human
intellectual capacities.
These debates about intelligence and rationality provide an example
of the complexity of the impact of evolutionary biology on conceptions
of human nature, for the dominant traditions in Western thought about
human nature have tended to concentrate attention more on what
distinguishes man from other animals than on the strictly biological
constitution that he largely shares with them. Possession of reason or
intellect is far from being the only candidate considered for such a
distinguishing characteristic. Man has been characterized as
essentially a tool user, or fabricator (Homo faber), as essentially
social, as essentially a language user, and so on. These represent
differing views concerning the fundamental feature that gives rise to
all the other qualities regarded as distinctively human and which
serve to mark man off from other animals. These characteristics all
centre on mental, intellectual, psychological — i.e.
nonphysiological — characteristics and thus leave scope for
debate about the relation between mind and body. So long as this
question remains open, and so long as mental or intellectual
constitution remains the central consideration in discussions of human
nature, the question of changes in — and of the possible
evolution of — human nature will remain relatively independent
of those devoted to physiological change and hence of strictly
biological evolution.
Until the 15th century the standard assumption was that man had a
fixed nature, one that determined both his place in the universe and
his destiny. The Renaissance humanists, however, proclaimed that what
distinguishes man from all other creatures is that he has no nature.
This was a way of asserting that man's actions are not bound by laws
of nature in the way that those of other creatures are. Man is capable
of taking responsibility for his own actions because he has the
freedom to exercise his will. This view received two subsequent
interpretations.
First, the human character is indefinitely plastic; each individual
is given determinate form by the environment in which he is born,
brought up, and lives. In this case, changes or developments in human
beings will be regarded as the product of social or cultural changes,
changes that themselves are often more rapid than biological
evolution. It is thus to disciplines such as history, politics, and
sociology, rather than to biology, that one should look for an
understanding of these processes. But if disciplines such as these
must constitute the primary study of man, then the question of the
extent to which this can be a strictly scientific study arises. The
methods of history are not, and cannot be, those of the natural
sciences. And the legitimacy of the claims of the so-called social or
human sciences to genuine scientific status has frequently been called
into question and remains a focus for debate.
Second, each individual is autonomous and must "make" himself.
Assertion of the autonomy of man involves rejection of the possibility
of discovering laws of human behaviour or of the course of history,
for freedom is precisely not being bound by law, by nature. In this
case, the study of man can never be parallel to the natural sciences
with their theoretical structures based on the discovery of laws of
nature. (M.E.T.)
In the tradition of Western thought up to the 20th century, the
study of man has been regarded as a part of philosophy. Two sayings
that have been adopted as mottoes by those who see themselves as
engaged in philosophical anthropology date from the 5th century BC.
These are: "Man is the measure of all things" (Protagoras) and "Know
thyself" (a saying from the Delphic oracle, echoed by Heracleitus and
Socrates, among others). Both reflect the specific orientation of
philosophical anthropology as humanism, which takes man as its
starting point and treats man and the study of man as the centre, or
origin, on which all other disciplines ultimately depend.
Man, the world, and God have constituted three important foci of
Western thought from the beginnings of its recorded history; the
relative significance of these three themes, however, has varied from
one epoch to another. Western thought has laid greater stress on the
existence of the individual human being than have the great
speculative systems of the East; in Brahmanism, for example, personal
identity dissolves in the All. But even so it was not until the
Renaissance that man became the primary focus of philosophical
attention and that the study of human nature began to displace
theology and metaphysics as "first philosophy" — the branch of
philosophy that is regarded as forming the foundation for all
subsequent philosophy and that provides the framework for all
scientific investigation.
From late antiquity onward differing views of man were worked out
within a framework that was laid down and given initial development by
Plato and later by Aristotle. Plato and Aristotle concurred in
according to metaphysics the status of first philosophy. Their
differing views of man were a consequence of their differing
metaphysical views.
Plato's metaphysics was dualistic: the everyday physical world of
changeable things, which man comes to know by the use of his senses,
is not the primary reality but is a world of appearances, or
phenomenal manifestations, of an underlying timeless and unchanging
reality, an immaterial realm of Forms that is knowable only by use of
the intellect. This is the view expressed in the Republic in
his celebrated metaphor of the cave, where the changeable physical
world is likened to shadows cast on the wall of a cave by graven
images. To know the real world the occupants of the cave must first
turn around and face the graven images in the light that casts the
shadows (i.e. use their judgment instead of mere fantasy) and,
second, must leave the cave to study the originals of the graven
images in the light of day (stop treating their senses as the primary
source of knowledge and start using their intellects). Similarly,
human bodily existence is merely an appearance of the true reality of
human being. The identity of a human being does not derive from the
body but from the character of his or her soul, which is an immaterial
(and therefore nonsexual) entity, capable of being reincarnated in
different human bodies. There is thus a divorce between the
rational/spiritual and the material aspects of human existence, one in
which the material is devalued.
Aristotle, however, rejected Plato's dualism. He insisted that the
physical, changeable world made up of concrete individual substances
(people, horses, plants, stones, etc.) is the primary reality. Each
individual substance may be considered to be a composite of matter and
form, but these components are not separable, for the forms of
changeable things have no independent existence. They exist only when
materially instantiated. This general metaphysical view, then,
undercut Plato's body-soul dualism. Aristotle dismissed the question
of whether soul and body are one and the same as being as meaningless
as the question of whether a piece of wax and the shape given to it by
a seal are one. The soul is the form of the body, giving life and
structure to the specific matter of a human being. According to
Aristotle, all human beings are the same in respect to form (that
which constitutes them as human), and their individual differences are
to be accounted for by reference to the matter in which this common
form is variously instantiated (just as the different properties of
golf and squash balls are derived from the materials of which they are
made, while their common geometrical properties are related to their
similar size and shape). This being so, it is impossible for an
individual human soul to have any existence separate from the body.
Reincarnation is thus ruled out as a metaphysical impossibility.
Further, the physical differences between men and women become
philosophically significant, the sex of a person becoming a crucial
part of his or her identity.
Although Plato and Aristotle gave a different metaphysical status
to forms, their role in promoting and giving point to investigations
of human nature was very similar. They both agreed that it is
necessary to have knowledge of human nature in order to determine when
and how human life flourishes. It is through knowledge of shared human
nature that we become aware of the ideals at which we should aim,
achieved by learning what constitutes fulfillment of our distinctively
human potential and the conditions under which this becomes possible.
These ideals are objectively determined by our nature. But we are
privileged in being endowed with the intellectual capacities that make
it possible for us to have knowledge of this nature. Development of
our intellectual capacities is thus a necessary part and precondition
of a fulfilled human existence.
Western medieval culture was dominated by the Christian Church.
This influence was naturally reflected in the philosophy of the
period. Theology, rather than metaphysics, tended to be given primacy,
even though many of the structures of Greek philosophy, including its
metaphysics, were preserved. The metaphysics of form and matter was
readily assimilable into Christian thought, where forms became ideas
in the mind of God, the patterns according to which he created and
continues to sustain the universe. Christian theology, however,
modified the positions, requiring some sort of compromise between
Platonic and Aristotelian views. The creation story in the book of
Genesis made man a creature among other creatures, but not a creature
like other creatures; man was the product of the final act of divine
initiative, was given responsibility for the Garden of Eden, and had
the benefit of a direct relationship with his creator. The Fall and
redemption, the categories of sin and grace, thus concern only the
descendants of Adam, who were given a nature radically different from
that of the animals and plants over which they were given dominion.
Man alone can, after a life in this world, hope to participate in an
eternal life that is far more important than the temporal life that he
will leave. Thus, belief in a life after death makes it impossible to
regard man as wholly a natural being and entails that the physical
world now inhabited by man is not the sole, or even the primary,
reality. Yet, the characteristically Christian doctrine of the
resurrection of the body also entails that the human body cannot be
regarded as being of significance only in the mortal, physical world.
Against the background of these constraints, Christian philosophy
first, through the writings of St. Augustine, gave prominence to
Platonic views. But this emphasis was superseded in the 12th century
by the Aristotelianism of St. Thomas Aquinas. Augustine's God is a
wholly immaterial, supremely rational, transcendent creator of the
universe. The twofold task of the Christian philosopher, a lover of
wisdom, is to seek knowledge of the nature of God and of his own soul,
the human self. For Augustine the soul is not the entire man but his
better part. There remains a Platonic tendency to regard the body as a
prison for the soul and a mark of man's fallen state. One of the
important consequences of Augustine's own pursuit of these two
endeavours was the emphasis he came to place on the significance of
free will. He argued that since the seat of the will was reason, when
people exercise their will, they are acting in the image of God, the
supreme rational being. Thomas Aquinas, while placing less emphasis on
the will, also regarded man as acting in the image of God to the
extent that he exercises and seeks to fulfill his intelligent nature.
But he rejected the Platonic tendency to devalue the body, insisting
that it is part of the concept of man that he have flesh and bone, as
well as a soul.
But whatever the exact balance struck in the relation between the
mind and body, the view of man was first and foremost as a creature of
God; man was privileged by having been created in the image of God and
given the gift of reason in virtue of which he also has free will and
must take the burden of moral responsibility for his own actions. In
order to fulfill his distinctively human nature man must thus order
his thoughts and actions in such a way as to reflect the supremacy of
religious values.
In popular medieval culture there was also, however, a strong
undercurrent of thoroughly fatalistic thought. This was reflected in
the popularity of astrology and alchemy, both of which appealed to the
idea that events on Earth are governed by the influence of the
heavenly bodies.
It was in the cultural context of the Renaissance, and in
particular with the Italian humanists and their imitators, that the
centre of gravity of reflective thought descended from heaven to
earth, with man, his nature, and his capacities and limitations
becoming a primary focus of philosophical attention. This gave rise to
the humanism that constitutes philosophical anthropology in the second
sense. Man did not thereby cease to view himself within the context of
the world, nor did he deny the existence of God; he did, however,
disengage himself sufficiently from the bonds of cosmic determination
and divine authority to become a centre of interest in his own eyes.
In ancient literature the educated people of the West rediscovered a
clear conscience instead of the guilty conscience of Christianity; at
the same time, the great inventions and discoveries suggested that man
could take pride in his accomplishments and regard himself with
admiration. The themes of the dignity and excellence of man were
prominent in Italian humanist thought and can be found clearly
expressed in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's influential De hominis
dignitate oratio (Oration on the Dignity of Man), written in 1486.
In this work Pico expresses a view of man that breaks radically with
Greek and Christian tradition: what distinguishes man from the rest of
creation is that he has been created without form and with the ability
to make of himself what he will. Being without form or nature he is
not constrained, fated, or determined to any particular destiny. Thus,
he must choose what he will become. (In the words of the 20th-century
existentialists, man is distinguished by the fact that for him
existence precedes essence.) In this way man's distinctive
characteristic becomes his freedom; he is free to make himself in the
image of God or in the image of beasts.
This essentially optimistic view of man was a product of the
revival of Neoplatonist thought. Its optimism is based on a view of
man as at least potentially a nonnatural, godlike being. But this
status is now one that must be earned; man must win his right to
dominion over nature and in so doing earn his place beside God in the
life hereafter. He must learn both about himself and about the natural
world in order to be able to achieve this. This was, however, only one
of two streams of humanist thought. The other (more Aristotelian) was
essentially more pessimistic and skeptical, stressing the limitations
on man's intellectual capacities. There is an insistence on the need
to be reconciled to the fact of man's humanity rather than to persist
in taking seriously his superhuman pretensions and aspirations. These
two differently motivated movements to focus attention on man himself,
on his nature, his abilities, his earthly condition, and his relation
to his material environment became more clearly articulated in the
16th and 17th centuries in the opposition between the rationalist and
empiricist approaches to philosophy.
The thought of Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French
skeptical author of the Essais (1580-95; Essays),
represented one of the first attempts at anthropological reflection
(i.e. reflection centred on man, which explores his different
aspects in a spirit of empirical investigation that is freed from all
ties to dogma). Skepticism, the adoption of an empirical approach, and
liberation from dogmatic authority are linked themes stemming from the
more pessimistic views of man's capacity for knowledge. The emphasis
on man's humanity — on the limited nature of his capacities
— leads to a denial that he can, even by the use of reason,
transcend the realm of appearances; the only form of knowledge
available to him is experimental knowledge, gained in the first
instance by the use of the senses. The effect of this skeptical move
was twofold. The first effect was a liberation from the dogmatic
authority of claims to knowledge of a reality behind appearances and
of moral codes based on them; skeptical arguments were to the effect
that human beings are so constituted that such knowledge must always
be unavailable to them. The second effect was a renewal of attention
to and interest in the everyday world of appearances, which now
becomes the only possible object of human knowledge and concern. The
project of seeking knowledge of a reality behind appearances must be
abandoned because it is beyond the scope of human understanding. And
this applies as much to man himself as to the rest of the natural
world; he can be known only experientially, as he appears to himself.
The anthropology of Montaigne began with a turning in upon himself;
it gave priority to that reality which was within. Montaigne, however,
was also witness to a renewal of knowledge brought about by numerous
discoveries that made the horizons of the traditional universe expand
greatly. For him, self-awareness already reflected an awareness of the
surrounding world; it wondered about the "savages" of America and
about the cannibals that were so different from him and yet so near;
it compared the intelligence of man with that of beasts and accepted
the idea of a relationship between animal existence and human
existence. The idea that moral codes are the work of man, rather than
reflective of an objective order, opened up the possibility of
recognizing the legitimate existence of a plurality of codes and thus
of the empirical study — rather than an immediate condemnation
and rejection — of the customs of others.
By contrast, the work of the 17th-century French philosopher
René Descartes represented a continuation of the theme of
optimism about man's capacities for knowledge. Descartes explicitly
set out, in his Meditations (first published in 1641), to beat
the skeptics at their own game. He used their methods and arguments in
order to vindicate claims to be able to have nonexperimental knowledge
of a reality behind appearances. The Meditations thus also
begins with a turning in of Descartes upon himself but with the aim of
finding there something that would lead beyond the confines of his own
mind.
Cartesianism occupies a key position in the history of modern
Western philosophy; Descartes is treated as a founding father by most
of its now diverse traditions. His work is characteristic of the
philosophical effort of the 17th century, which was engaged in a
struggle to achieve a synthesis between old established orders and the
newly proclaimed freedoms that were based on a skeptical rejection of
the older orders. There are undeniable tensions in the philosophy of
this period that are the product of various unsuccessful attempts to
reconcile two very different views of man in relation to God and the
world.
The first, the authoritarian view, was that inherited from medieval
philosophy and from Thomist theology. It derived its ideal of human
freedom from the Stoic conception of the wise man, who, in the 17th
century was called a man of honestas (the French concept of
honnêteté). The man of honestas seeks
freedom in the discovery of and obedience to the order and law on
which the world is grounded. He believes that there is such a law,
that he has a "place" in the scheme of things, and that he is bound to
his fellow human beings by that nature through which he participates
in this higher order. He tends to look to the authorities —
whether these be church, state, or classical texts — for
knowledge of this order, for it is not to be found at the level of
experience; it is a "higher" order. His worldview is derived from a
mixture of Platonic and Aristotelian (realist) metaphysics.
The second, the libertarian view, was that of the skeptical
humanists — individualists and freethinkers, skeptical of any
preestablished order, or at least of man's ability to know what it is
or might be. The skeptical humanist is therefore untrammeled by it.He
deploys skeptical arguments to release the individual from the
constraints and demands of outer authorities. He is free to do what he
wills or desires and to make his own destiny, for there can be no
knowledge of objective norms. Human knowledge is limited to
experience, to what is sensed, and people must therefore make their
own order within experience. His view is descended from the via
moderna of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham and the
nominalists.
The synthesis sought was a position that would incorporate
recognition of the individual and of his freedom under universal
principles of order, a reconciliation of will with reason. This was
sought via a nonauthoritarian conception of objective knowledge, which
was the same conception that gave rise to modern science. This
required, on the one hand, arguments to combat those of the skeptical
freethinkers — arguments that demonstrated that there was an
objective order external to human thought and that humans have the
capacity not merely to know of its existence but also to discover
something of its nature. On the other hand, it was necessary to
establish, against the authorities, that each individual, insofar as
he is rational, has the capacity to acquire knowledge for himself, by
the proper use of his reason. It is this second requirement that
produced numerous treatises on the scope and limits of human
understanding and on the method of acquiring knowledge. The focus was
now firmly fixed on the nature of human thought and on the procedures
available to it.
Descartes utilized the skeptic's own arguments to urge a meditative
turning inward. This inward journey was designed to show that each
human being can come to knowledge of his intellectual self and that as
he does so he will find within himself the idea of God, the mark of
his creator, the mark that assures him of the existence of an
objective order and of the objective validity of his rational
faculties. The foundation and starting point of Cartesian knowledge
is, for each individual, within himself, in his experience of the
certainty that he must have of his own existence and in the idea of a
perfect, infinite being, in other words, an idea that he finds within
himself, of a being whose essence entails God's existence, and of
whose existence man can thus be assured on the basis of his idea of
God.
Descartes thus preserved and built on Montaigne's emphasis on
self-consciousness, and this is what marks the changed orientation in
philosophy that constitutes philosophical anthropology in the
stricter, second sense. As the French scientist and religious
philosopher Blaise Pascal realized, the question had now become one of
whether man finds within himself the basis of loyalty to a universal
order of reason and law with which his own thought and will is
continuous, or whether he finds, by inner examination, that order, at
least insofar as it can be known, is relative to his feeling, desire,
and will.
The attempt to regain an objective order by looking inward
apparently fails with the failure of Descartes's proofs of the
existence of God, proofs that his contemporaries (even those who, like
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, were sympathetic to many aspects of the
project) were quick to criticize. Reaction to this failure was
twofold. In the work of rationalist philosophers, such as Spinoza,
Leibniz, and Malebranche, there is a return to the classical Greek
approach to philosophy through metaphysics. Empiricists, such as
Locke, Condillac, and Hume, on the other hand, retain the Cartesian,
introspective basis seeking what Hume calls a mitigated skepticism.
This is a position that recognizes essential limitations placed on
human cognitive capacities by assuming that experience is the only
source of knowledge, but that affirms the value of the knowledge so
gained and seeks to define the project of natural science as a quest
for objective order within this domain.
John Locke, for instance, argued that while man cannot prove that
the material world exists, his senses give him evidence affording all
the certainty that he needs. Locke's position is, however, essentially
dualist: mind and body remain distinct even though pretensions to
intellectual transcendence are given up. Moreover, Locke regarded it
as in principle impossible for humans to have any understanding of the
relation between mind and body. All perceptions of one's own body, as
of the rest of the material world, are ideas in one's mind. It is
impossible to adopt any vantage point outside oneself from which to
observe the correlation between a condition of one's body and one's
perception of this condition. Where other people are concerned, their
bodies and behaviour can be observed but an observer can have no
direct perception of what is going on in their minds. There is thus a
bifurcation in the study of man. The mind and its contents are known
to each person by introspection; it is presumed that the minds of all
people work in basically the same way so that introspection provides
evidence for human psychology. Other people, their bodies, and their
behaviour are known by observation in exactly the same way that
knowledge of any other natural object is obtained. One infers from
their behaviour that they have minds like one's own and on this basis
attributes psychological states to them.
In keeping with this bifurcation Locke distinguished between the
terms "man" and "person," reserving "man" for the animal species, an
object of study for natural historians. "Person" is used to denote the
moral subject, the being who can be held responsible for his actions
and thus praised, blamed, or punished. According to Locke, what
constitutes a person is a characteristic continuity of consciousness,
which is not merely rational thought but the full range of mental
states accessible to introspection. Just as a tree is a characteristic
organization of life functions sustained by exchanges of matter, so a
person is a characteristic organization of mental functions continuing
through changes in ideas (the matter of thought). A person can be held
responsible for an action only if he acknowledges that action as one
which he performed; i.e. one of which he is conscious and
remembers having performed.
The empiricist position thus opens up the possibility of empirical
studies both of man as a natural and as a moral being and puts these
studies on a par with the natural sciences. But it does so in such a
way that the resulting picture lacks any integral unity, for man is an
incomprehensible union of body and mind.
A renewed study of the natural history of man was stimulated by
European encounters with the great anthropoid apes of Africa (Angola)
and Asia (the Sunda Islands) at the beginning of the 16th century.
Until then Europe had known only the smaller monkeys, which were too
far removed from the human species to present any confusion. The
discovery of the chimpanzee and the orangutan (meaning "man of the
woods" in Malay) raised such questions as whether the anthropoid, who
resembles man, is an animal or a man, and why it should be considered
an ape and not a man. In the climate of opinion — typified by
Locke and fostered by the Royal Society of London, with its enthusiasm
for empirical observation — these questions prompted the
detailed observational studies of a leading member of the society,
Edward Tyson.
Tyson had the opportunity to study the remains of a young
chimpanzee (named Pygmie) from Angola that had died in London several
months after its arrival. His research was published by the Royal
Society in 1699 under the title Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris:
or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with That of a Monkey, an Ape,
and a Man. This treatise, a landmark in anthropology and
comparative anatomy, is remarkable for the empirical approach used in
the investigation. Tyson's precise measurements, his complete
exploration of the external and internal structures of the animal, and
his minutely detailed sketches permitted him to pose what is perhaps
the central problem of physical anthropology: whether it is possible
to find among the anatomical or physiological characteristics of the
ape the justification for asserting a radical difference between ape
and man, notwithstanding all their similarities. He analyzed in great
detail the similarities and dissimilarities between a chimpanzee and a
man. He emphasized the fact that the ape is a quadrumane (having four
hands) rather than a quadruped (having four feet); unlike the human
foot, its foot has an opposable, and thus thumblike, big toe. The
arrangement of the internal organs allows the erect posture that makes
the ape similar to man. But on an analysis of the form and mass of the
brain and speech apparatus, Tyson concluded that he was unable to
determine, from a strictly anatomical point of view, why the ape is
incapable of thinking and speaking.
Integral to the empiricism that forms the philsophical background
to Tyson's work was a rejection of the whole notion of forms or
essences as objectively determining fixed and strict demarcations
within the natural world. Classification was the work of man imposed
upon a natural continuum, which replaced the older ladderlike
conception of the Chain of Being. This encouraged a quest for "missing
links," examples of intermediary forms between those already
recognized. For example, zoophytes (invertebrate animals resembling
plants, such as sponges) were said to form the link between the
vegetable order and the animal order. For Tyson, the chimpanzee was
the missing link between animal and man.
If physical anthropology was born out of Western man's encounter
with the anthropoid apes, cultural anthropology was made necessary by
his encounter with people in the rest of the world during the great
voyages of discovery begun in the 15th century. Cultural anthropology
became the product of the confrontation between the classical values
of the West and the opposing values and customs of newly discovered
civilizations.
The "savage" appeared to manifest a style of humanity that was a
contradiction of the certainties that had sustained Europeans for
centuries. The shock was such that the naked Indian and the cannibal
were at first assumed not to belong to the human race; this approach
enabled Europeans to avoid the problem. This solution was, however,
rejected by Pope Paul III in 1537 in his bull, or decree, Sublimus
Deus ("The Transcendent God"), according to which Indian savages
were human beings; they had souls and, as such, could be initiated
into the Christian religion. This left the problem of how to reconcile
the increasingly manifest human diversity with the theological
requirement of human unity. One solution was to account for diversity
in terms of environment, including cultural environment, and to regard
the "savage" as a "primitive," as a "man of nature," who remained
close to an initial state from which a privileged part of humanity had
been able to remove itself by a continued effort at community and
individual advancement. A study of the history of man endeavoured to
bring to light the successive stages through which the human species
had passed along the way to the present civilized societies. The
themes of "civilization" and "progress" were among the principal
preoccupations of the Enlightenment.
What has come to be known as the Enlightenment is characterized by
an optimistic faith in the ability of man to develop progressively by
using reason. By coming to know both himself and the natural world
better he is able to develop morally and materially, increasingly
dominating both his own animal instincts and the natural world that
forms his environment. However, the divergence between rationalist and
empiricist traditions continues, giving rise to rather different
interpretations of this theme.
The writings of the Scottish philosopher David Hume give a clear
statement of the implications of empiricist epistemology for the study
of man. Hume argued first that scientific knowledge of the natural
world can consist only of conjectures as to the laws, or regularities,
to be found in the sequence of natural phenomena. Not only must the
causes of the phenomenal regularities remain unknown but the whole
idea of a reality behind and productive of experience must be
discounted as making no sense, for experience can afford nothing on
the basis of which to understand such talk. Given that this is so, and
given that man also observes regularities in human behaviour, the
sciences of man are possible and can be put on exactly the same
footing as the natural sciences. The observed regularities of human
conduct can be systematically recorded and classified, and this is all
that any science can or should aim to achieve. Explanation of these
regularities (by reference to the essence of man) is not required in
the sciences of man any more than explanation of regularities is
required in the natural sciences.
Man thus becomes an object of study by natural history in the
widest possible sense. All observations — whether of physiology,
behaviour, or culture — contribute to the empirical knowledge of
man. There is no need, beyond one of convenience, to compartmentalize
these observations, since the method of study is the same whether
marital customs or skin colour is the topic of investigation; the aim
is to record observations in a systematic fashion making
generalizations where possible. Such investigations into the natural
history of man were undertaken by Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach,
among others.
In his Systema Naturae (1735), the Swedish naturalist
Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) gave a very precise
description of man, placing him among the mammals in the order of
primates, alongside the apes and the bat. But the distinguishing
characteristic of man remains his use of reason; something that is not
dependent on any physiological characteristics. Moreover, the
variations that are to be found within the genus Homo sapiens
are the product of culture and climate. In later editions of
Systema Naturae, Linnaeus presented a summary of the diverse
varieties of the human species. The Asian, for example, is "yellowish,
melancholy, endowed with black hair and brown eyes," and has a
character that is "severe, conceited, and stingy. He puts on loose
clothing. He is governed by opinion." The African is recognizable by
the colour of his skin, by his kinky hair, and by the structure of his
face. "He is sly, lazy, and neglectful. He rubs his body with oil or
grease. He is governed by the arbitrary will of his masters." As for
the white European, "he is changeable, clever, and inventive. He puts
on tight clothing. He is governed by laws." Here mentality, clothes,
political order, and physiology are all taken into account.
The French naturalist Georges Leclerc, comte de Buffon, devoted two
of the 44 volumes of his Histoire naturelle,
général et particulière (1749-1804) to man
as a zoological species. Buffon criticized Linnaeus' system and all
other systems of classification that depended only on external
characteristics; to force individual objects into a rational set of
categories was to impose an artificial construct on nature. He was
echoing arguments that Locke had used, arguments based on the
conception of the Great Chain of Being as a continuum, not as a
sequence of discrete steps. An artificial taxonomy came from the mind,
not from nature, and achieved precision at the expense of
verisimilitude. Buffon's answer was to determine species not by
characteristics but by their reproductive history. Two individual
animals or plants are of the same species if they can produce fertile
offspring. Species as so defined necessarily have a temporal
dimension: a species is known only through the history of its
propagation. This means that it is absurd to use the same principles
for classifying living and nonliving things. Rocks do not mate and
have offspring, so the taxonomy of the mineral kingdom cannot be based
on the same principles as that of the animal and vegetable kingdom.
Similarly, according to Buffon, there is "an infinite distance"
between animal and man, for "man is a being with reason, and the
animal is one without reason." Thus, "the most stupid of men can
command the most intelligent of animals because he has a
reasoned plan, an order of actions, and a series of means by which he
can force the animal to obey him." The ape, even if in its external
characteristics it is similar to man, is deprived of thought and all
that is distinctive of man. Ape and man differ in temperament, in
gestation period, in the rearing and growth of the body, in length of
life, and in all the habits that Buffon regarded as constituting the
nature of a particular being. Most important, apes and other animals
lack the ability to speak. This is significant in that Buffon saw the
rise of human intelligence as a product of development of an
articulated language. But this linguistic ability is the primary
manifestation of the presence of reason and is not merely dependent on
physiology. Animals lack speech not because they cannot produce
articulated sound sequences, but because, lacking minds, they have no
ideas to give meaning to these sounds.
The German scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is recognized as the
father of physical anthropology for his work De Generis Humani
Varietate Nativa ("On the Natural Variety of Mankind"), published
in 1775 or 1776. He also regarded language as an important
distinguishing characteristic of man, but added that it is only man
who is capable of laughing and crying. Perhaps most important is the
suggestion, also made by the American statesman Benjamin Franklin,
that it is only man who has hands that make him capable of fashioning
tools. This was a suggestion that broke new ground in that it opened
up the possibility of speculating on a physiological origin for the
development of intellectual capacities.
The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with
having wakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. But while Kant
concurred with Hume in rejecting the possibility of taking metaphysics
as a philosophical starting point (dogmatic metaphysics), he did not
follow him in dismissing the need for metaphysics altogether. Instead
he returned to the Cartesian project of seeking to find in the
structure of consciousness itself something that would point beyond
it.
Thus, Kant started from the same point as the empiricists, but with
Cartesian consciousness — the experience of the individual
considered as a sequence of mental states. But instead of asking the
empiricists' question of how it is that man acquires such concepts as
number, space, or colour, he enquired into the conditions under which
the conscious awareness of mental states — as states of mind and
as classifiable states distinguished by what they purport to represent
— is possible. The empiricist simply takes the character of the
human mind — consciousness and self-consciousness — for
granted as a given of human nature and then proceeds to ask questions
concerning how experience, presumed to come in the form of sense
perceptions, gives rise to all of man's various ideas and ways of
thinking. The methods proposed for this investigation are
observational, and thus the study is continuous with natural history.
The enterprise overlaps with what would now be called cognitive
psychology but includes introspection regarded simply as
self-observation. But this clearly begs a number of questions, in
particular, how the empiricist can claim knowledge of the human mind
and of the character of the experience that is the supposed origin of
all ideas.
Even Hume was forced to admit that self-observation, or
introspection, given the supposed model of experience as a sequence of
ideas and impressions, can yield nothing more than an impression of
current or immediately preceding mental states. Experiential
self-knowledge, on this model, is impossible. The knowing subject, by
his effort to know himself, is already changing himself so that he can
only know what he was, not what he is. Thus, any empirical study,
whether it be of man or of the natural world, must be based on
foundations that can only be provided by a nonempirical, philosophical
investigation into the conditions of the possibility of the form of
knowledge sought. Without this foundation an empirical study cannot
achieve any unified conception of its object and never will be able to
attain that systematic, theoretically organized character that is
demanded of science.
The method of such philosophical investigation is that of critical
reflection — employing reason critically — not that of
introspection or inner observation. It is here that the origin of what
has come to be regarded as philosophical anthropology in the stricter,
third sense (i.e. 20th-century humanism) can be identified,
since there is an insistence that studies of the knowing and moral
subject must be founded in a philosophical study. But there remain
questions about the humanity of Kant's subject. Kant's position was
still firmly dualist; the conscious subject constitutes itself through
the opposition between experience of itself as free and active (in
inner sense) and of the thoroughly deterministic, mechanistic, and
material world (in the passive receptivity of outer sense). The
subject with which philosophy is thus concerned is finite and
rational, limited by the constraint that the content of its knowledge
is given in the form of sense experience rather than pure intellectual
intuition. This is not a differentiated individual subject but a form
of which individual minds are instantiations. The ideals regulating
this subject are purely rational ideals. This tendency is even more
marked in the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
Humanist thought is anthropocentric in that it places man at the
centre and treats him as the point of origin. There are different ways
of doing this, however, two of which are illustrated in the works of
Locke and Kant, respectively. The first, realist, position assumes at
the outset a contrast between an external, independently existing
world and the conscious human subject. In this view man is presented
as standing "outside" of the physical world that he observes. This
conception endorses an instrumental view of the relation between man
and the nonhuman, natural world and is therefore most frequently found
to be implicit in the thought of those enthusiastic about modern
technological science. Nature, from this viewpoint, exists for man,
who by making increasingly accurate conjectures as to the laws
governing the regular succession of natural events is able to increase
his ability to predict them and so to control his environment.
The second, idealist position, argues that the world exists only in
being an object of human thought; it exists only by virtue of man's
conceptualization of it. In the form in which Kant expressed this
position the thought that constitutes the material, physical world, is
that of a transcendent mind, of which the actual minds of humans are
merely vehicles. There is also a third, dialectical, form of
anthropocentrism, which, although it did not emerge fully until the
19th century, was prefigured in the works of Vico and Herder. From
this standpoint the relation between man and nature is regarded as an
integral part to the dynamic whole of which it is a part. The world is
what it is as a result of being lived in and transformed by human
beings, while people, in turn, acquire their character from their
existence in a particular situation within the world. Any thought
about the world is concerned with a world as lived through a subject,
who is also part of the world about which he thinks. There is no
possibility of transcendence in thought to some external, non-worldly
standpoint. Such a position wants both to grant the independent
existence of the world and to stress the active and creative role of
human beings within it. It is within this relatively late form of
humanism — which arose from a synthesis of elements of the
Kantian position, with the insights of the Italian Giambattista Vico
and the German Johann Gottfried von Herder — that philosophical
anthropology in the third sense can be located.
Vico's Scienza nuova (1725; The New Science of
Giambattista Vico) announced not so much a new science as the need
to recognize a new form of scientific knowledge. He argued (against
empiricists) that the study of man must differ in its method and goals
from that of the natural world. This is because the nature of man is
not static and unalterable; a person's own efforts to understand the
world and adapt it to his needs, physical and spiritual, continuously
transform that world and himself. Each individual is both the product
and the support of a collective consciousness that defines a
particular moment in the history of the human spirit. Each epoch
interprets the sum of its traditions, norms, and values in such a way
as to impose a model for behaviour on daily life as well as on the
more specialized domains of morals and religion and art. Given that
those who make or create something can understand it in a way in which
mere observers of it cannot, it follows that if, in some sense, people
make their own history, they can understand history in a way in which
they cannot understand the natural world, which is only observed by
them. The natural world must remain unintelligible to man; only God,
as its creator, fully understands it. History, however, being
concerned with human actions, is intelligible to humans. This means,
moreover, that the succession of phases in the culture of a given
society or people cannot be regarded as governed by mechanistic,
causal laws. To be intelligible these successions must be explicable
solely in terms of human, goal-directed activity. Such understanding
is the product neither of sense perception nor of rational deduction
but of imaginative reconstruction. Here Vico asserted that, even
though a person's style of thought is a product of the phase of
culture in which he participates, it is nonetheless possible for him
to understand another culture and the transitions between cultural
phases. He assumed that there is some underlying commonality of the
needs, goals, and requirement for social organization that makes this
possible.
Herder denied the existence of any such absolute and universally
recognized goals. This denial carried the disturbing implication that
the specific values and goals pursued by various human cultures may
not only differ but also may not all be mutally compatible. Hence, not
only may cultural transitions not all be intelligible, but conflict
may not be an attribute of the human condition that can be eliminated.
If this is so, then the notion of a single code of precepts for the
harmonious, ideal way of life, which underlies mainstream Western
thought and to which — whether they know it or not — all
human beings aspire, could not be sustained. There will be many ways
of living, thinking, and feeling, each self-validating but not
mutually compatible or comparable nor capable of being integrated into
a harmonious pluralistic society.
The 19th century was a time of greatly increased activity in the
sciences of man. There was a correspondingly rapid development of
various disciplines, but this was accompanied by increasing
specialization within disciplines. Perhaps the most significant theme,
common to all branches of science, was the declining influence of
religon. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had concurred in
thinking that the transcendence of God doomed to failure any attempt
to encompass him within the framework of human discourse. Theological
discourse was thus only human discourse. Herder had stated, "It is
necessary to read the Bible in a human manner, for it is a book
written by men for men." Even so, he insisted, "The fact that religion
is integrally human is a profound sign in recognition of its truth."
But with human truth the only available truth, such a line was hard to
maintain, and by the late 19th century the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche had announced that God was dead. But the death
of God also meant that the essence of God in every man was dead
— that which was common to all and that in virtue of which the
individual transcended the natural, material world and his purely
biological nature. Also dead was the part of a person that recognized
universal God-given ideals of reason and truth, goodness and beauty.
There thus emerged views of man that, while integrating him more
thoroughly with the natural world — treating his incarnation as
an essential aspect of his condition — had to come to terms with
the consequences for science, morality, and the study of man himself
of the removal of a transcendent support for belief in absolute
standards or ideals.
The presumption of a fixed human nature was undercut at the level
of natural history by the emergence and eventual acceptance of
evolutionary biology. This added a historical, developmental dimension
to the natural history of man, which complimented developmental views
of culture and of man as a culturally constituted being. But more
importantly, evolutionary biology made man a direct descendant of
nonhuman primates and suggested that the gift of reason, which so many
had seen as establishing a gulf between man and animal, might too have
developed gradually and might indeed have a physiological basis.
Even though Buffon had tied classification to the ability to
reproduce, and had thus introduced a temporal dimension into the
characterization of species, he had retained the idea of stable
species. But a static classification could not explain the dynamic
relations between isolated species. A primitive time line of natural
history thus developed. The relationship of families led to the idea
of filiation between them according to an order of succession. The
interpretation of fossils aroused impassioned debates. From them have
arisen concepts of mutation (the process by which thegenetic material
of a cell is altered), transformism (the theory that one species is
changed into another), and evolution. These concepts, already being
formulated in the 18th century, were clarified in the work of Lamarck
and Darwin.
The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin's Origin of
Species (1859) differed from that of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck in
that it proposed a mechanistic, nonpurposive account of evolution as
the product of the natural selection of randomly produced genetic
mutations (survival of the fittest). Advantageous characteristics
acquired by an individual were not, as Lamarck had thought, inherited
and therefore could not play a role in evolutionary development.
The theme of continuity with the rest of the natural world was one
that was also to be found in the very different, antiscientific
thought of Romanticism, which was one of the reactions to the rise of
the doctrine of mechanism and to the Industrial Revolution for which
it was held responsible. The experience of the Industrial Revolution
was crucial to most 19th-century thought about man. Reactions to this
experience can be put into three broad categories. There were those
who saw in industrialization the progressive triumph of reason over
nature, making possible the march of civilization and the moral
triumph of reason over animal instinct. This was a view that continued
the spirit of the Enlightenment, with its confidence in reason and the
ability to advance through science. Into this category can be put the
English philosopher John Stuart Mill, a stout defender of liberal
individualism. Mill's philosophy was in many respects a continuation
of that of Hume but with the addition of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian
view that the foundation of all morality is the principle that one
should always act so as to produce the greatest happiness of the
greatest number. This ethical principle gives a prominent place to the
sciences of man (which are conceived as being parallel in method to
the natural sciences), their study deemed necessary for an empirical
determination of the social and material conditions that produce the
greatest general happiness. This is a non-dialectical, naturalistic
humanism, which gives primacy to the individual and stresses the
importance of his freedom. For Mill, all social phenomena, and
therefore ultimately all social changes, are products of the actions
of individuals.
The humanist opponents of capitalist industrialization fall into
two groups, both presuming some form of dialectical humanism: those
who, like Marx, retained a faith in the scientific application of
reason and those who, like Goethe and Schiller, fundamentally
questioned the humanity of mechanistic science and the technology it
spawned. The Romantics questioned the instrumental conception of
the relation between man and nature, which is fundamental to the
thinking behind much technological science. They insisted on an
organic relation between man and the rest of nature. It is not man's
place outside of nature that is emphasized but his situation within
it. Equally central to this view was a recognition of the historicity
of human culture and a rejection of any conception of a fixed,
determined human nature on which a science of man parallel in
structure to the natural sciences (i.e. a science with laws,
whether empirical or rational, that determine the actions and the
historical development of mankind) could be based. There was a
continued commitment to the perspective of the individual, and his
creative relation with the world, an orientation that was carried over
into the philosophical anthropology of 20th-century phenomenologists
and existentialists, with their critiques of modern industrial
science.
The Marxist opposition to capitalist industrialization is not to
industrialization as such but to capitalist forms of it. This
opposition is founded on socialism, which stresses the role of social
structures; it is at the level of society — its structures and
its economic base of production — that the course of history can
be understood. Marx emphasized the importance of labour and work in
man's relation both to the natural and to the social worlds in which
he finds himself and which condition his ability to realize himself
through these relationships. He deplored the loss of humanity
associated with capitalist industrialization, which was manifest in
the alienating conditions under which members of the working class
were treated as objects and thus deprived of their full status as
human subjects by their industrial masters. Nonetheless, he retained a
faith in scientific knowledge and in the possibility of a scientific
understanding of history by integrating its economic, social, and
political aspects. Marx argued, however, that it was not reason but
revolution that would cause the overthrow of the capitalist system.
Common to all of these reactions is that whether they privileged
reason or not they did not seek to validate the claims of reason
— and hence the claims of science — by reference to a
rational God. But with this transcendent guarantor removed, the
question of the objectivity of rational standards and of the
commonality of human thought structures became pressing. The Cartesian
starting point focused attention on thought as a sequence of ideas,
knowable only to the individual concerned. Animals, even if capable of
uttering structured sound sequences, were denied linguistic abilities
on the ground that these sound sequences could not be the expressions
of thoughts and could not have meaning; lacking minds, animals also
lack ideas, the thoughts that give words their meaning. According to
this view, words are simply conventionally established vehicles for
the communication of thoughts that exist prior to, and independent of,
their linguistic expression. However, if it is not assumed that human
minds are all instantiations of a single transcendent mind, or that
although individual they were created from a common pattern, this
account of linguistic communication must appear inadequate. Since
according to Cartesianism introspection is the only route to awareness
of ideas, each person can only ever be aware of his own ideas, never
of those of another. He could never know that his attempts to
communicate succeed in calling up in another person's mind ideas
similar to those in his own. Some new way of looking at linguistic
communication was required, and this could be nothing short of a new
starting point, a new way of thinking about thought itself.
The mood of the late 19th century, which has also dominated
20th-century philosophy, can be characterized as anti-psychologistic
— a rejection of introspective, idea-oriented ways of thinking
about thought, which presume that thought is prior to language. This
fundamental reorientation had implications for every other aspect of
the study of man. The writers of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries who most influenced subsequent philosophical thought about
man were Gottlob Frege, Edmund Husserl, Ferdinand de Saussure, and
Sigmund Freud. Each helped to transform one of the three reactions to
the Industrial Revolution outlined above, to bring it into accord with
the new, anti-psychologistic orientation: Frege influenced the
empiricist, scientific reaction; Husserl the Romantic; and Saussure
and Freud the scientific Socialist.
Frege argued that if language is to be a vehicle for the expression
of objective, scientific knowledge of the world, then the meaning
(cognitive content) of a linguistic expression must be the same for
all users of the language to which it belongs and must be determined
independently of the psychological states of any individual. A word
may call up a variety of ideas in the mind of an individual user, but
these are not part of its meaning. Such associations may be important
to the poet but are irrelevant to the scientist. The function of
language in the expression of scientific knowledge is to represent an
independently existing world. The meanings of linguistic expressions
must thus derive from their relation to the world, not from their
relation to the minds of language users. Similarly, logic —
embodying the principles of reasoning and the standards of rationality
— must be concerned not with laws of human thought, but with
laws of truth. The principles of correct reasoning must be justified
by reference to the function of language in representing the world
correctly or incorrectly rather than by reference to human psychology.
It is for his work on formal logic, which stemmed from these ideas,
that Frege is renowned, because it opened the way for the mechanical
reproduction of reasoning processes, which was crucial to the
development of information processing by computers and for devices
capable of artificial intelligence. Frege argued that the principles
of deductive reasoning are purely formal principles, which means that
their correct application does not depend on an ability to understand
the sentences involved, so long as they have been put into the correct
logical form. To give an account of the meaning of a sentence requires
that it be analyzed so as to reveal its logical form. The logical
analysis of everyday and scientific language thus becomes a primary
focus of philosophical activity, hence the name "analytic philosophy"
for the tradition, predominating in Great Britain, North America, and
Australasia that can be regarded as post-Fregean philosophy. In this
tradition the focus is on the analysis of rational, human thought,
where it is presumed that the only correct way to do this is to
analyze the logical structure of language.
Thus language has replaced God as the locus of rationality and of
principles of reason; and the language-world relation has taken over
many of the roles previously played by the God-world relation. The
individual participates in a rationality that is independent of him to
the extent that he is a language user. The position assumes that
standards of rationality are absolute, since they are seen as
necessarily governing the meaning structures of all languages. The
linguist Noam Chomsky proposed a thesis that was regarded as being
complimentary to this philosophical position, namely that of a
universal grammar — a formal structure that underlies all
languages, no matter how diverse their grammatical forms seem on the
surface. Moreover, he suggested that all humans have the same innate
capacity to learn language, which explains why it is that they all
structure their languages, and hence their thought, in the same way.
A further assumption (christened the "principle of charity" by the
American philosopher Donald Davidson) is that all humans are rational
and that the majority of human behaviour is to be explained as
rational, given the beliefs and desires of the person concerned. This,
together with the view that language is the locus of rationality and
the embodiment of thought, leads to the view that the primary
objective of the sciences of man is to interpret the language of a
community under study so as to attribute beliefs and desires to its
members on the basis of what they say, and so give some explanation of
their behaviour. The interpretation is deemed incorrect if the
attributed beliefs and desires result in too much behaviour being
portrayed as irrational. There will then be a mutual adjustment
between language interpretation and the explanation of behaviour in
which there can be no final separation of the two and no such thing as
a uniquely correct interpretation. There is thus no hope of finding
laws linking psychological states of belief or desire to physiological
states, even though, by maintaining that each mental event is just a
physical event under a different description, a dualism of mind and
body is denied. What remains is an irreducible dualism between
physiological and psychosocial studies of man. The situation is
frequently explained by utilizing a computer analogy (for the computer
is, in this view, man creating a machine in his own image). The
relation between the structures of thought and the body is likened to
the relation between computer software and hardware; the same hardware
may be used to run different software, and the same software may be
run on different hardware. The two descriptions of computer
functioning are thus relatively independent.
In this account the consciousness of the individual plays little
explicit role, but a model of man is nevertheless implicit in the
whole approach. It is still basically the model employed by Hume, with
experience consisting of sensory stimuli. Experience of other people
is thus limited to observation of their physical and behavioral
characteristics. It is on the basis of such observations that we have
to make conjectures about their mental states. What has changed is the
method of making such attributions. It is not sufficient to argue by
analogy from introspection; any attribute of rational or mental
faculties must go via an analytic interpretation of the language
spoken. But with the assumption that all languages must share a common
logical structure in virtue of their function in representing the
world, there is also an inbuilt presumption of a uniformity in the
rational structure of all human thought.
Husserl is regarded as the founder of phenomenology. He, like
Frege, wished to avoid the so-called psychologism of idea-based
discussions of thought and rejected naturalistic approaches to the
study of the mind and of what passes for rational thought. He, too,
believed that laws of reasoning needed to be validated by reference to
the objects of thought, but he did not agree that logic could be made
purely formal and independent of the particular subject matter in
hand, nor did he agree that the primary focus should be on language.
Indeed, he rejected the position from which Frege started, namely, the
assumption that there is a clear separation between the knowing
subject and an independently existing reality that is the object of
his knowledge. This assumption, Husserl argued, reveals a blindness to
the conditions, or presuppositions, involved in all knowledge and
already analyzed in part by Kant. Husserl adopted Kant's strategy but
in a more radical form that was designed to restore the
in-the-worldness of the human subject.
The program of phenomenology aimed at rigorous understanding of the
life-world. Kant had explored the conditions of the possibility of
experience, and in so doing he had presumed that this experience was
always that of an "I," a subject. Husserl also asked after the
conditions for the possibility of a consciousness that is always
potentially self-conscious. He claimed that all consciousness is
intentional; i.e. is consciousness of something. The method
pursued was a phenomenal investigation of the "contents of
consciousness." This required the investigator to "bracket off" all
theories, presuppositions, and evidence of existence, including his
own existence. There could be no dogmas. The implication was still
that the individual can, in principle, abstract from every influence
of culture and environment by abstracting also from that element of
consciousness that involves awareness of self. It was presumed that
consciousness as such had structures that would then be revealed. It
is only self-conscious thought that is culturally constituted; for
Husserl, each human individual is by necessity socially and
historically conditioned by his environment. But even so it has to be
doubted whether the required abstraction from self is possible in the
sort of consciousness — i.e. reflective rational thought
— that is required of a rigorous phenomenological analysis.
Descartes and his successors had taken the self, the individual
subject, for granted and in the process inevitably had assigned to the
knowing subject a position outside, beyond, or transcending the world
of which he sought knowledge. Husserl, by putting the individual
subject into the field of philosophical investigation, paved the way
for investigations of the human condition that start with the
concrete, with man's being-in-the world. In this respect he can also
be regarded as the founder of philosophical anthropology in the
narrowest sense of the term: the personal unity of the human being
becomes both the point of departure and the goal of philosophical
reflection. The use of philosophical anthropology to characterize this
approach emerged in the first half of the 20th century with the
tendency both in Germany and in France to treat the problems of
anthropology as the centre of all philosophical studies. Its emergence
at this time may be seen as a reaction to the totalitarian systems of
the 20th century: Italian Fascism, Soviet Communism under Stalin, and
German Nazism were powerful ideologies calling for the annihilation of
the individual character of the person. The philosophical protests of
the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, of the Russian existentialist
Nikolay Berdyayev, of the Jewish philosophical theologian Martin
Buber, and of the French personalist Emmanuel Mounier offered answers
to this challenge; the philosophies of the person and of existence
present to each individual the means to centre himself upon himself.
Husserl's work not only gave rise to phenomenology but also to the
existentialist ideas of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Heidegger adopted the method of phenomenology but rejected Husserl's
refusal to allow existence to feature in the phenomenological starting
point. Heidegger argued for a philosophy in which man's
being-in-the-world is registered, and where this being (existence)
precedes any determination of what man is (his essence).
In his Brief über den "Humanismus" (1947; Brief
Letter on Humanism), Heidegger wrote:
Are we really on the right track toward the essence of man
as long as we set him off as one living creature among others in
contrast to plants, beasts and God? when we do this we
abandon man to the essential realm of animalitas but attribute
a specific difference to him. In principle we are still thinking of
homo animalitas — even when anima (soul) is
posited as animus sive mens, and this in turn is later posited
as subject, person, or spirit (geist). Such positing is in the
manner of metaphysics.
Naturalistic definitions of man fail, because like all traditional
metaphysical definitions they naively assume that we know what we mean
when we say of something that it is; i.e. when we ascribe
being to it.
Humanity and the world form a whole in which neither is privileged.
The focus shifts from intentional objects of consciousness to the
world itself, a world of objects that appear (and hence exist as
individualized objects) only insofar as they have meaning and
significance for human beings, by virtue of the way in which they
relate to human projects. A fallen tree branch is noticed as firewood
only by one who is in search of fuel. Similarly, events are noticed
and recorded and so become historical events but only in the light of
the meaning that they have for the historian. This means that neither
history nor the study of man can be objective and purely factual
history. History is always a story about the past from someone who has
a specific vantage point within history.
Sartre, in L'Être et le néant (1943; Being
and Nothingness), tried to tread a middle line between Husserl and
Heidegger, retaining the concrete in-the-worldness of Heidegger while
restoring a place for intentional consciousness. He hoped to provide
an account of, as he put it,
intentional-consciousness-in-the-world-as-it-is-lived. Sartre's
driving belief was in human freedom, the ability to choose not only a
course of action but also what one would become. Neither Husserl, with
his already structured and regulated consciousness, nor Heidegger,
with his world that is already given meaning, left enough room for
freedom.
Sartre insisted on the dualism of being (thingness) and
consciousness (no-thingness) and of the individual in itself and for
itself. The disjunction between these is absolute: no state of the
world can determine human action, even to the extent of providing a
motive, or reason, for action. If man is truly free, the world,
whether material or social, can place no constraints on him, not even
to the extent of determining what would or would not be good reasons
for following a given course of action. He must create his own values
and his own morality and take responsibility for his choices. Sartre's
critics pointed out, however, that this total freedom dissolves into
arbitrariness and randomness. An action that is selected at whim,
chosen without (or beyond) reason, and that recognizes no rational
constraints, is more an abandonment to fate than an assertion of
freedom; where there is no basis for decision there is simply the
necessity to choose.
In his later writings, and in particular the Critique de la
raison dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason),
which attempts a reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism,
Sartre came to recognize that there are constraints on the exercise of
human freedom. He first acknowledged that man is a creature with
biological needs, who must eat, drink, shelter, and clothe himself as
a condition of being able to engage in other kinds of activity; and,
second, he saw the struggle against need as conditioned by the fact
that it takes place in conditions of scarcity. This means that there
is competition for resources and thus the ever-present likelihood that
the realization of an individual's freedom will limit that of another.
Each individual in these conditions experiences others as possible
threats to his own freedom (i.e. he experiences alienation).
Individuals whose freedom is in this way conditioned, not just by
naturally occurring material conditions but by the materiality of
human practice, are (as Marx had said) both "subjects" and "objects"
of history. But Sartre insisted that history is only intelligible
because it records a process brought into being by human action. This
rules out an understanding of history based on a "dialectic of
nature," adopted by some Marxists whom Sartre criticized as being
dogmatists. Sartre thus rejected the idea that there could be any
naturalistic science of humanity — a science that proceeds by
discovering laws without reference to the consciousness of
individuals. History is neither a mere process (without a subject) nor
the product of some form of social, collective "subject." But this
does not mean that individuals can be treated as wholly independent
units that can be understood without taking into account the formative
and conditioning role of their material and social situation. It is in
this work that Sartre was still facing up to, and grappling with, the
problem of the reconciliation of the demands of freedom and reason,
but in an altogether more practical and concrete way than was done by
his 17th-century predecessors.
Sartre's abandonment of the radical freedom of Being and
Nothingness owed much to the French phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty's criticism of it — in Sens et non-sens
(1948; Sense and Non-Sense) — as being still a dualist
philosophy of consciousness and for failing to put man truly in the
world. In Sense and Non-Sense he also expressed his view of the
relation between existentialism and Marxism:
Marx gives us an objective definition of class in terms
of the effective position of individuals in the production cycle, but
he tells us elsewhere that class cannot become a decisive historical
force and revolutionary factor unless individuals become aware of it,
adding that this awareness itself has social motives, and so on. As a
historical factor, class is therefore neither a simple objective fact,
nor is it, on the other hand, a simple value arbitrarily chosen by
solitary consciousnesses.
In Merleau-Ponty's writing there is also a clear statement of the
human presupposition that forms the basis of philosophical
anthropology in this third sense:
I am not the result or the intersection of multiple
causalities that determine my body or my "psychism"; I cannot conceive
of myself as nothing but a part of the world, as the simple object of
biology, psychology, and sociology, nor close over myself the universe
of science. Everything that I know of the world, even through science,
I know from a viewpoint that is my own
One effect of the insistence that it is concrete, lived experience
that must form the starting point of philosophical anthropology is
that not only must class and its experience enter into such accounts,
but so too must sex and gender. Once the human subject, as a focus of
philosophical attention, is no longer a mind whose relation to a body
is at best obscure, is no longer a pure consciousness, but is
essentially embodied and immersed in human culture, the biological
differences between the sexes and the socially constituted role
differentiation between male and female must play a part in the
account of humanity.
In Simone de Beauvoir's Deuxième Sexe (1949;
The Second Sex), she used the categories provided by Sartre to
argue that to be a woman — as distinct from a man — is to
be robbed of one's subjectivity, to be treated as an object by men,
and to have one's conception of oneself as female defined by men. To
assert her subjectivity a woman must thus negate her femininity, to
reject the status of object for men that constitutes the feminine. A
woman is thus placed in a condition of self-alienation, with which a
man does not have to contend. In this way de Beauvoir revealed the
need for a philosophy of "man" that is also a philosophy of "woman," a
viewpoint that generally has been acknowledged only by female writers.
Just as class and gender determine the way in which one lives in
the world and is related to the world, so too may religion. Even for
those not brought up in any religion, Western culture is still one in
which religion is significant. Philosophical anthropology must thus
take the phenomenon of religious experience seriously, in a way that
empiricist anthropology does not. But its starting point is with the
constitution of a religious consciousness, and with the conditions of
the possibility of the forms of religion encountered; it does not
start with theology. There is room once again for dispute over the
possibility of any kind of transcendence. The 19th-century Danish
philosopher Søren Kierkegaard thought that man's existence has
meaning only in the experience of grace, which inexplicably raises man
up from his worthlessness. The anguish and loneliness of mortal
existence, the "wretchedness of man without God," is only overcome by
a form of experience that confers faith in the existence of God and
hence the ultimate possibility of human transcendence.
Philosophical anthropology in its narrowest (third) sense is
founded on an insistence that the only knowledge available to man is
knowledge from his human perspective, conditioned, as he himself is,
by his situation in the world. God cannot be invoked as a source of
absolute standards of truth or of absolute values nor to give content
to the supposition that there are any. If God exists, then the thought
that there are such standards and values, even if we cannot know of
them, remains possible. This possibility was denied with Nietzsche's
proclamation of the death of God; the attempt to come to terms with
this view defines the scope of most philosophical anthropology. The
view of religion that reflects the inversion which takes place was
expressed by Ludwig Feuerbach in Das Wesen des Christentums
(1841; The Essence of Christianity), when he declared that "man
is not a shadow of God; it is God who is the shadow of man, an
illusory phantasm that man nourishes out of his own substance."
There were also those, however, who saw the death of God as
heralding the death of man as the focus and starting point for
philosophy. Saussure, in his Cours de linguistique
général (1915; Course in General
Linguistics), held, like Frege, that the meaning of a linguistic
sign, that which gives it a value for the purposes of communication,
could not be an idea in the mind of an individual. But unlike Frege he
did not concentrate on the relation between language and an external
world. Rather, he argued that the meaning of any one linguistic sign
is dependent on its relation to other signs in the language to which
it belongs; thus, the meaning of one sign is determined by its place
in the overall structure that constitutes a language. A consequence of
this view is that language becomes a closed, autonomous system.
Linguistic signs do not depend for their meaning on anything external
to language. Moreover, Saussure argued that the present meaning of a
word could not be revealed by tracing its etymology. It is only by
reference to present language structures that current meanings are
determined. The language structures that become the focus of attention
are thus to be treated as autonomous from their history (i.e.
as if they had no history).
With this focus on structures and the method of studying them,
Saussure can be considered to be one of the founding figures of
structuralism. This view of meaning came to be extended from
linguistic signs to all kinds of human actions to which a conventional
meaning, or significance, is attributed. It has been used as the
framework for anthropological investigations of cultures, their
customs, etc., as, for example, in the work of Claude
Lévi-Strauss or in the interpretation of dreams and the
structures of the unconscious in the works of Jacques Lacan.
It is significant that, again, meaning is studied without reference
to the consciousness of individual language speakers. Man is treated
as essentially not just a language speaker but as a user and
interpreter of signs, and the significance of these signs is
determined without reference to any relation to the individual. A
language, or sign-system, takes over the role of providing the
framework of reason in which significance is given, but this framework
transcends the individual. Such systems of codification regulate all
human experience and activity and yet lie beyond the control of either
individual or social groups. Indeed, since there is no meaning or
understanding outside of a given sign-system, it is only from the
meaning of the signs he "uses" that the individual comes to learn what
it is that he means by his action, and hence what he thinks. This is
why such views of language can readily be grafted onto Freud's theory
of the unconscious.
Freud treated the realm of the mind as one that is as law-governed
as is the natural world; nothing that a person does or says is
haphazard or accidental, for everything can in principle be traced to
causes that are somehow in the person's mind, although many of these
are not accessible to consciousness. Freud's view of the human mind is
thus very different from Descartes's. For Freud, the part of the mind
that is accessible to consciousness is but the tip of a large iceberg;
the hidden remainder, which influences the conscious, is the
unconscious. Thus, for instance, there are unconscious desires that
can cause someone to do things that he cannot explain rationally to
others, or even to himself. In this there is a parallel between Freud
and Marx, for both hold views on which human consciousness, far from
being perfectly free and rational, is really determined by causes of
which man is not aware; but whereas Marx says that these causes are
social and economic in nature, Freud claims that they are individual
and mental. In both cases the implications for the study of man are
anti-psychologistic in that they turn attention away from the
individual consciousness. On both views a scientific understanding of
man is only to be gained by examining the factors that determine
consciousness rather than the level of the individual subject of
consciousness.
In his later expositions (those given in the 1920s) Freud assigned
to the mind a tripartite structure: the id, which contains all the
instinctual drives seeking immediate satisfaction; the ego, which
deals with the world outside the person, mediating between it and the
id; and the superego, a special part of the ego that contains the
conscience, the social norms acquired in childhood. Whatever can
become conscious is in the ego, although even in it there may be
things that remain unconscious, whereas everything in the id is
permanently unconscious. The instincts or drives contained in the id
are the motivating forces in the mental apparatus, and all of the
energy of the mind comes from them. Freud included a sexual instinct
as one of the basic instincts and thus gave sexuality a much wider
scope in psychology and in the study of man than had previously been
the case. Freud's account of individual human character is also
developmental. He held that particular "traumatic" experiences,
although apparently forgotten, could continue to exercise a harmful
influence on a person's mental health. The fully fledged theory of
psychoanalysis generalizes from this and asserts the crucial
importance, for the adult character, of the experiences of infancy and
early childhood. Freud also held that the first five or so years of
life are the time in which the basis of an individual's personality is
laid down; one cannot fully understand a person, therefore, until he
comes to know the psychologically crucial facts about that person's
early childhood. Freud produced detailed theories of the stages of
development that are concerned specifically with the development of
sexuality, in which this concept is widened to include any kind of
pleasure obtained from parts of the body. Freud's view was that
individual well-being, or mental health, depends on a harmonious
relationship between the various parts of the mind and between the
person and the real world in which he must live. Neurosis results from
the frustration of basic instincts, either because of external
obstacles or because of internal mental imbalance. The work of the
analyst is to interpret the behaviour and speech of a patient in such
a way as to give insight into the unconscious, to be able to explain
what is inexplicable at the conscious level, and in this way to try to
give the patient an understanding of himself. Here there is a need for
a theory of signs and of interpretation in which its notion of
meaning, or significance, does not rest on either reference to the
physical world or on ideas in an individual consciousness;
structuralist theories provide one such possibility.
From the point of view of either Freudian theory or of the
non-existentialist reading of Marx, any attempt to provide a study of
man — of human behaviour and history — that starts from
the individual consciousness must seem misguided. This will include
the empiricist approaches, which assume that all human behaviour is to
be explained in terms of the conscious mental states (i.e.
beliefs and desires) of individuals. Such approaches seem to fail to
acknowledge that the causes of human actions include factors of which
they are not consciously aware. A scientific account, one that is
concerned with providing causal explanations, must not be confined to
the subjectivity of the individual consciousness but must adopt an
objective standpoint, a standpoint from which these factors can be
recognized and studied. Equally as important, however, the sort of
arguments used by phenomenologists and existentialists to query the
availability of objective viewpoints can be reapplied here. Thus,
structuralism gives place to the post-structuralism of Derrida and
Deleuze, according to which neither a scientific nor a philosophical
anthropology is possible.
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 pensée 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); AMÉLIE 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 LÉVI-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).