Naturalism andPhilosophicalAnthropologyNature, Life, and the Human between Transcendental and Empirical Perspectives

Edited by Phillip HonenbergerConsortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, US

palgravemacmillan

Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Phillip Honenberger 2016 Remaining chapters © Contributors 2016All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N STS.Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMiLLANPalgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.ISBN: 978-1-137-50087-8This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction iPhillip Honenberger

1 In Pursuit of Something 'Essential' about Man: Heidegger andPhilosophical Anthropology 27Beth Cykowski

2 Gehlen, Nietzsche, and the Project of a PhilosophicalAnthropology 49Richard Schacht

3 Hans Blumenberg: Philosophical Anthropology and theEthics of Consolation 66Vida Pavesich

4 Naturalism, Pluralism, and the Human Place in the Worlds 94Phillip Honenberger

5 Plessner's Conceptual Investigations of 'Life':Structural Narratology 121Scott Davis

6 Gehlen's Philosophical Anthropology: ContemporaryApplications in Addiction Research 147Sally Wasmuth

7 The Hybrid Hominin; A Renewed Point of Departure forPhilosophical Anthropology 171Lenny Moss

8 Intentionality and Mentality as Explanans and as Explanandum:Michael Tomasello's Research Program from the Perspective of Philosophical Anthropology 183Hans-Peter Kruger

9 Biology and Culture 219Joseph Margolis

V

vi Contents

10 The Mortal Self: Toward a Transcendental-Pragmatic Anthropology Sami Pihlstrdm

229

Index 253

Acknowledgments

The editor would like to thank three professional organizations for hosting sessions at which some chapters contained in this volume were first presented: the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), under the titles 'Philosophical Anthropology T and 'Philosophical Anthropology IT, in Montpellier, France, 2013; and the Society for Humanist Philosophers at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, in Baltimore, MD, 2013, under the session entitled 'Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology'. The APA session was chaired and facili­tated by John Shook (thank you John!).

The Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine has provided the editor with library support, relief from teaching duties, and a stimulating research environment since 2014, thereby facilitating completion of this project. For the cover image, the editor is indebted to Frances Osugi, who first noticed the relevance of Waterhouse Hawkins' famous image to the book's themes, and then, upon request, pains­takingly produced a satisfactory transformation of this image. Finally, thanks are due to Palgrave Macmillan and especially Esme Chapman for seamless support and guidance throughout the publication process.

vii

IntroductionPhillip Honenberger

The main goals of this volume are, first, to extend and deepen the contemporary Anglophone discussion of philosophical anthropology; and, second, to do so as a contribution to contemporary discussions of naturalism, broadly construed. The main purpose of this Introduction is to elucidate and motivate these goals, as well as to provide an overview of the chapters that follow. 1 fulfill that purpose in three stages: first, a brief clarification of the meaning of the volume's title and the motives for its selection; second, a cursory historical and thematic introduction to the volume's main theme, philosophical anthropology; and, third, an overview of individual chapters.

Naturalism and philosophical anthropology: nature, life, and the human between transcendental and empirical perspectives

What are human beings? What are their fundamental limits and capaci­ties? What conceptual frameworks or research programs would be best for understanding and explaining them? Though these questions are in some sense perennial, they have taken on radical new shades of meaning in modernity. Nowhere have they been more subtly and insightfully addressed than in the tradition known as 'philosophical anthropology', associated with the work of Max Scheler (1874-1928), Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985), and Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976), among others. In the past 30 (if not 100) years, European discussions in and about philosophical anthropology have steadily increased in frequency and sophistication. Until recently, these discussions were almost entirely inaccessible to Anglophone readers. The publication of this volume, as well as several

1

2 Phillip Honenberger

recent others (Iris, 2009; Giri and Clammer, 2013; De Mul, 2014), herald a welcome reversal of this trend.

The expression ^philosophical anthropology' designates not only a tradition of research and reflection, however, but also a field of inquiry, definable (albeit controversially) as that which includes all philosoph­ical inquiries into 'the human'. A distinction between the tradition and the field of philosophical anthropology is often made, though vari­ously articulated (compare, for instance, Fischer, 2009b, pp. 153-154; Pihlstrdm, 2003, p. 260; Kruger, 1999, p. 24). While most essays in this volume are concerned with the tradition in some way, a few are presented only as contributions to the field. However, the tradition and field are not entirely distinct, insofar as each displays some historical and thematic overlap with the other. I further clarify the meaning of 'philosophical anthropology' in both senses below.

The other main conjunct of this collection's title - 'naturalism' is likely to be more widely recognized among Anglophone readers. Anglophone philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, for instance, was nothing short of obsessed with 'naturalism , seeking to clarify its status and implications with seemingly tireless enthusiasm. ^ And while non-philosophical disciplines may be less inclined to thema- tize naturalism directly, similar issues are central to debates throughout the academy. Some of the main questions that have motivated debates about naturalism could be expressed as follows: What is the scope, and what are the limits, of the epistemic authority of the natural sciences, particularly in comparison with the social sciences, humanities, and religion? What is the ontological status of 'the natural' (and, relatedly, the 'physical', 'material', 'biological', 'organic', and so on)? What are we to make (epistemologically, metaphysically, or empirically) of those entities that do not appear to be natural, or do not have a clearly articu­lable place within natural scientific discourses, such as normativity and first-personal experience? What are the implications of new or changed conceptions of nature, for other aspects of human life and experience? The essays in this volume seek to address issues pertaining to these and related controversies through engagement with philosophical anthro­pology as a tradition or as a field.

* For recent discussions, see De Caro and MacArthur, 2004, 2009. To some extent, discussions similarly motivated to those surrounding naturalisni are currently taking place under the headings of 'materialism' and 'new materialism. See, for instance, Bennett, 2010.

Introduction 3

The first part of the volume's subtitle - 'nature, life, and the human' - identifies three key subsidiary themes of the essays that follow. By any measure, the concepts of 'nature', (organic) 'life', and 'the human', are crucial philosophical and scientific reference points, whose meanings and interrelationships are something close to dialectically unavoidable, given their obviously wide-ranging significance. The precise articula­tion of any of these concepts is extraordinarily laden with controversy. A characteristic feature of philosophical anthropology, both as tradi­tion and as field, has been its effort to achieve a satisfactory articu­lation of and orientation to these concepts, both singly and in their relation to one another. Relevantly to this project of clarification and interpretation, the three main founders of the tradition of philosophical anthropology - Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen (discussed further in the following section below) - were sympathetic inheritors of two intellec­tual streams that have rarely come together: (1) the broadly naturalist, bio-philosophical, and evolutionary-biological and ecological traditions that flourished in fin de siMe thought, including, for instance, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, and Jakob von Uexkull; and (2) the German idealist, hermeneutic, and phenomenological traditions, including G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and many others. This unusual dual heritage alone suggests that philosophical anthropology may lend a special subtlety and innovation to contem­porary discussions of nature and naturalism, materialism, organic life, biology, and the human.

The second half of the subtitle - 'between empirical and transcen­dental perspectives' - signifies the special methodological diversity and range of the approaches taken by the volume's contributors. Both the tradition and field of Philosophical Anthropology are especially marked by concerns with, and controversies over, method - in particular, the validity and implications of the methods by which human beings are conceived and studied. The selection of 'empirical' and 'transcendental' as boundary points of the range of methodological options exhibited is, to some extent, arbitrary, insofar as structural, pragmatic, existential- phenomenological, and other methodological options are also presented and discussed in the essays that follow. But given the great significance of the empirical-transcendental distinctions in post-Kantian philosophy, and its marked legacy in ongoing debates in and around philosophical anthropology, including in the essays that follow, this couple seemed an especially appropriate choice of metaphorical 'bookends' for the meth­odological range in question.

4 Phillip Honenberger

Philosophical anthropology as tradition

History of the traditionThe tradition of philosophical anthropology is generally taken to have begun with Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner in the 1920s. The ques­tion of the extent to which Scheler or Plessner deserves primary credit for this initiation is a matter of controversy (see Fischer, 2009a, for discus­sion). As early as 1924, Scheler had announced an intended work on Philosophische Anthropologies This work was never completed, but by the time of Scheler's death in 1928, he had produced a number of drafts and notes for the project, as well as given a talk in Darmstadt in 1927 that he described as a 'summary' [Zusammenfassung] of the intended work. The 1927 summary was soon published as 'Die Sonderstellung des Menschen' in DerLeuchter, Vol. VIII (1927), and then as a standalone book: the well- known Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos [The Place of Human Beings in the Cosmos] (1928a). Scheler's statement at the opening of that text that '[e]ver since the awakening of my philosophical thinking, the ques­tion "what is the human being and what is his place in being?" has occupied me more fundamentaUy than any other question I have dealt with', gives evidence of the seriousness and centrality of this project for Scheler's late-career self-understanding (Scheler, 2009 [1928], p. 3).

Plessner's claim to have co-founded philosophical anthropology rests largely on his Die Stufen des Organischen md der Mensch: Einleitung in der philosophische Anthropologie [The Stages of the Organic and Man. Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology] (1928), published near- contemporaneously with Scheler's sketch. Because Plessner's views on the subject were arguably more fully worked out than Scheler s - as indi­cated by the impressively systematic stmcture and content of Die Stufen - one might say that, if Scheler was the first to conceive of philosophical anthropology as a project, Plessner was the first to carry a project of that form to something like a complete expression.^

Due to Scheler's wide-ranging influence, the concept and name of 'phil­osophical anthropology' were certainly 'in the air' in German-language

^ Fischer (2009a, p. 665). , c^ Based on common thematic or methodological characteristics, a number of

earlier figures are sometimes retroactively included in the tradition - notably J.G. Herder, Immanuel Kant (especially in the pre-critical period, as detailed by Zammlto, 2002), Wilhelm Dilthey, and Friedrich Nietzsche. An effort to ideii- tify the tradition on the basis of thematic or methodological characteristics is conducted in the following section.

Introduction 5

philosophy by 1929, if not sooner. By that time, for instance, Heidegger could, in his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), distinguish his reading of Kant's central philosophical insight - on Heidegger's account, the 'analytic of finitude' - from all 'philosophical-anthropological' readings of Kant's work.^ But Heidegger's rejection of philosophical anthropology, while influential, was hardly universal. Plessner continued to write about philosophicai anthropology, throughout the 1930s to the 1950s, contributing important reflections on the defining problems, concerns, and methods of philosophical anthro­pology as a new ijitellectual project, distinguished from earlier and other contemporary intellectual projects (for instance, Plessner, 1937, 1941, 1956). And Ernst Cassirer, writing from Yale University in the 1940s, could consider subtitling his forthcoming English-language monograph An Essay on Man (1944), 'Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology' - a subtitle that, by the time of the book's publication, he had changed to 'An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture'.®

The next major contribution to the developing tradition of philo­sophical anthropology saw publication in 1940: the first edition of Arnold Gehlen's Der Mensch: Sein Natur und Seine Stellung in der Welt [Man: His Nature and Place in the World]. This text went through 10 editions, including major revisions, between 1940 and 1974. Gehlen's apparent inclusion in a tradition of philosophical anthropology, along with Scheler and Plessner before him, may be partly a product of Gehlen's own influential articulation of the continuity and defining themes and positions of the tradition.® In a manner comparable to John Dewey's constraction of a 'pragmatist tradition' of philosophy through a construal of the innovations of Charles Peirce and William James as precursors of his own, Gehlen contributed greatly to the perception

^ Heidegger, 1990 [1929], §§36-37. By contrast, a few years earlier in Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] (1965 [1927]), Heidegger had discussed Scheler's views, particularly of 'the person' (as presented in Scheler, 1973 [1913, 1916]), but without any explicit mention of philosophical anthropology.

® Cassirer (2005). The partially drafted but never completed fourth volume of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophic der symbolischen Formen [Philosophy of Symbolic Forms] included detailed discussion, from as early as 1928, of Scheler's and Plessner's philosophical anthropologies (Cassirer, 1996). Of Die Stufen, Cassirer wrote in 1928 that 'Plessner's...results are very close to my own, even though they were reached by an altogether different route' (1996, p. 62).

® Some contemporary discussants have questioned whether Cehlen belongs to a common tradition with Scheler and Plessner. See for instance Kriiger (2010), contra Fischer (2009a, 2009b).

6 Phillip Honenberger

that philosophical anthropology was a delimitable and distinct tradi­tion and, at the same time, secured his inclusion as a 'founding figure' within a lineage that prominently included the earlier founders. To be sure, Gehlen's ability to accomplish this feat rested in large part on the scope and brilliance of Der Mensch.

Anxieties surrounding Gehlen's place in the tradition of philosophical anthropology are not limited to questions of historical fidelity. By the time of Der Mensch's publication in 1940, Plessner - whose ancestry included some Jewish background and whose politics tended towards a democratic liberalism inconsistent with the ascendant Nazi platform in Germany - had left Germany for the Netherlands. Scheler, bom of a Jewish mother, had long since passed away. But Gehlen had been living and teaching in Germany as a professor of philosophy since 1933.^ Furthermore, he had explicitly articulated his support and fidelity to the Nazi regime. Scholars have attempted to trace evidence of Nazi themes - especially racialism, biol- ogism, and authoritarian politics - in at least the first editions of Gehlen's Der Mensch, and sought clarity on whether later editions were changed in such a way as to eliminate these elements - or, perhaps, were not so changed. While the issue remains controversial, there seems to be some consensus that while Gehlen's anthropological views do quite plausibly support a conservative or even authoritarian politics, and while Gehlen himself was undoubtedly more a conservative than a radical (consider, for instance, his vocal opposition to the student movements of the 1960s), evidence of racism, and especially anti-semitism, is very hard to find in any edition of Gehlen's main text. (See Rehberg [1988] for a review of these inquiries and Honneth and Joas [1988 (1980)] for discussion.)

From 1940 to Gehlen's death in 1976 and Plessner's death in 1985, the two figures published numerous commentaries and systematic works, intended both to clarify the overall project and identity-conditions of philosophical anthropology - the project that had self-consciously begun with Scheler and Plessner in the 1920s - and to develop and extend their own substantive philosophical anthropologies, as well as related treatments of matters sociological, political, aesthetic, and otherwise.® Other self-described contributors to philosophical anthro­pology during this period (or, at least, figures who sympathetically

^ Gehlen's first full professorial appointment was at Frankfurt (1933-1934),'as replacement for Paul Tillich, who had been forced into exile. See Rehberg (1988, pp. xxvili-xxxii).

® See Gehlen (1978-1985) and Plessner (1980-1985). For the remainder of this section, only a small selection of the relevant literature is cited in detail.

Introduction 7

discussed philosophical anthropology and/or made positive use of the views of Scheler, Gehlen, or Plessner) include Erich Rothacker, Odo Marquard, Michael Landmann, and Hans Blumenberg. More recently, Peter Sloterdijk, Hans-Peter Krdger, Jos de Mul, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Heike Delitz, Lenny Moss, and many others have made what could be described as contributions to the tradition.®

Philosophical anthropology began in Germany, and it continues t6 be more recognized and discussed in German-language contexts than anywhere else in the world. The tradition has become increasingly important worldwide, however. For the sake of this book's Anglophone readership, a brief review of the English-language secondary litera­ture may be helpful. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's influen­tial text on social psychology. The Social Construction of Reality (1966), made extensive use of Scheler's, Plessner's, and Gehlen's ideas, arguing that these provided a naturalistic basis for a relativistic social science. Marjorie Grene (1968, 1974) introduced the ideas of Helmuth Plessner and related figures (though not Scheler and Gehlen) to Anglophone audiences, as did Fred Dallmayr (1974) for Plessner's and Gehlen's political philosophies, and Richard Schacht (1976) for the place of the philosophical-anthropological tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth- century European philosophy. In recent years, several English-language publications have discussed aspects of the tradition in even more sophisticated ways. Among these was the translation of Axel Honneth and Hans Joas's Soziales Handeln und menschliche Natur (1980) [Social Action and Human Nature (1988)]. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg's introduc­tion to the 1988 English-language translation of Gehlen's Der Mensch, 10th ed. (Rehberg, 1988; Gehlen, 1988 [1975]), provided an incompa­rably thorough English-language discussion of that work. Scheler's texts and views have long been discussed in English by Max Frings, Eugene Kelly, Kenneth Stikkers, and many others.'® In the past five years, several English-language essay collections have addressed aspects of the tradi­tion in unprecedentedly sophisticated ways." We intend this volume as, among other things, an addition to this growing literature, which will

® Lysemose (2013, p. 48) suggestively refers to Marquard, Bliunenberg, and Sloterdijk as key members of a 'second generation' of philosophical anthro­pology. For Blumenberg's philosophical anthropology, see Pavesich (2008) and her essay in this volume.

Schneck (2002) is an especially Interesting recent collection." In particular. Iris (2009), Giri and Clammer (2013) and De Mul (2014).

8 Phillip Honenberger

help intellectuals both today and in the future to enter into, make use of; or at least satisfactorily orient themselves to this tradition.

Defining aims of the traditionTo appreciate a philosophical school or tradition, one needs more than a description of the networks that connect its participants. In partic­ular, one wants to know about such things as its characteristic themes, commitments, motives, and methods.^^ In this section, I attempt to distinctively characterize the philosophical-anthropological tradition through appeal to three of its central motives or aims. The three aims to be considered are:

(a) to develop a theory of human beings that lends unity to the variety of discourses and disciplines that study them;

(b) to situate human beings within a continuum of modes of being that includes non-human organisms and, to some extent, non-organic being (such as material, environmental, or ideal being);

(c) to better grasp and explore the role of the conditions that shape one or another manifestation of human subjectivity, in regard to their relevance for philosophical questions and controversies (for instance, regarding cognition, agency, and social structure).

(a) The unity of the human beingThe first of these aims is emphasized by Scheler (1928a) and Plessner (1928), and recently emphasized again by Piet Strydom (2013), who writes that philosophical anthropology's 'motive was to overcome disci­plinary boundaries by bringing together philosophy and science as well as the various sciences themselves, in so far as they deal with the nature

Efforts to characterize philosophical traditions - such as logical positivism, pragmatism, phenomenology, or philosophical anthropology - are of course subjects of high-level intellectual controversy in their own right, and concerned parties have filled literally thousands of pages attempting to instructively recast such traditions. In this editor's opinion, discussions of the identities of such traditions are important and indispensable. We write and think about them both because it matters, and because we have to in order to be understood by others and to understand ourselves. Yet we should remember that the objects we seek to capture in these descriptions are also contingent and open-ended historical enti­ties. Strict 'necessary and sufficient conditions' for membership in such traditions are not sensibly to be insisted upon.

Introduction 9

of human beings' (p. 111).^^ Schacht (1990) likewise gives voice to this intention of the tradition when he writes,

[W]e already have a discipline called "anthropology," with both phys­ical and cultural branches, and beyond that a whole cluster of "human sciences," biological, social, and psychological. Why add another, "philosophical" anthropology to the list...?...A part of the answer- I would give is that all of these disciplines, by their very natures, are restricted to dealing with human reality from particular perspectives, and in ways limited further by the very methodologies which enable them to develop as disciplines. A philosophical anthropology, which would be locked into no such particular perspective and restricted to no such methodology, would for that very reason be better able to make collective sense of the human reality with which they ail deal, drawing upon them and yet achieving a more comprehensive under­standing than they severally can. (Schacht, 1990, pp. 157-158)

Scheler's, Plessner's, and Gehlen's articulations of this aim differ from one another in interesting ways. Scheler stresses a division between rational, spiritual, and naturalistic conceptions of the human being, traceable to Ancient Greek phiiosophical, Judeo-Christian religious, and modem scientific understandings and interpretations of human beings, respectively (Scheler, 2009 [1928], pp. 5-6). His account is intended to integrate these perspectives, giving each its appropriate ontologicai piace and epistemic authority in relation to the others.’^

Plessner, on the other hand, emphasizes the special challenges that nineteenth-century sciences, such as linguistics, bioiogy, and ethnology, posed to the inherited triumvirate of metaphysical options: mental- physical dualism, materialism, and idealism (Plessner, 1928, chs 1-2; Plessner, 2003 [1937]; Plessner, 2003 [1961]). On Plessner's account, these new sciences show the failure of the inherited views by requiring

Suggestively, Strydom emphasizes the poiiticai impetus to this 'unification' motif, writing of a 'widespread conviction in the early twentieth century that science could make a meaningful contribution to social life only if it were related back to the epoch-making cultural crisis of the time...[Thus, t]he search for this synthesis [the one above] was driven not by an abstract yearning for universal knowledge, but rather by the urgent need for practical understanding, for know­ledge which could give direction and guide the living of life' (pp. 110-111).

'■* This distinction among divergent inherited views of the human being is interestingly developed by Landmann (1974 [1955]).

10 Phillip Honenberger

that the 'interior', psychological life of human beings and their 'outer' behavior in space and time, be more closely related than the inherited views allow. Plessner diagnoses the root cause of the failure in what he calls, 'the Cartesian alternative'; namely, the idea that all entities must be either mental and internal, or physical and external, but not both. Plessner's philosophical anthropology (in Plessner [1928] and, to some extent, Plessner [1923], [1941], and elsewhere) is intended to supply a new mapping of the ontological and phenomenological relationships between the 'inner' and the 'outer' through constmction of a new set of fundamental categories, inclusive of nature, lived body (Leib), physical body {Korpef), organic life, environment (Umwelt), and expression.

Gehlen (1940, 1975), finally, conceived of the problem of 'unity' as simply one that emerges from the increasing plurality of empirical sciences that take human beings as their object, such as evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, and sociology. Each of these sciences is (and ought to be, consistent with its ovm intentions and methodological strengths and limitations) focused only on one or a few aspects of human beings' behavior, cognition, and experience. The role of philosophical anthropology, as Gehlen conceived it, was as an integration of the findings of such specialized perspectives within a coherent theory of their common object, 'the human being'. Gehlen's unifying anthropology was thus empirical, and no more ontological or 'fundamental' than the sciences it synthesized; it was also more general and more likely to be controversial.

(b) The human being within continua of beingA second characteristic aim of philosophical anthropology is an effort to articulate the 'place' of human beings within the continuum of forms of organic life.^® This inquiry could be summarized as a concern with the question of 'human distinctiveness', that is, an effort to clarify which powers, tendencies, and modes of relationship with their environments human beings share with non-human forms of organic life, and which

*5 One might interpret this aim as a sub-class of inquiries into the place of human beings within being in general, or within various continua or planes of being. See Honenberger, this volume. However, there is arguably some privileged significance to the frame provided by a continuum of organic beings. In any case, the organicist frame is one held in common by Scheler (2009 [1928]), Plessner (1928), and Gehlen (1940,1988 [1975]), as Fischer (2009a, 2009b) emphasizes.

Introduction 11

are distinctive of human forms of life, and why. Fischer (2009b) describes this aim as follows:

[I^or Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen the comparison between plants, animals and human beings or, at the very least, between animals and human beings, is a postulate for the development for their argu­ment. ... Each of the relevant authors begins by considering the living , body, placed at a remove, within its environment, and then proceeds through the classification of the various types of life (plants, animals), to arrive at the end-point, which is the [specifically human] mind. (Fischer, 2009b, pp. 154-155)

Similar projects have more recently been undertaken by philosophers explicitly inspired by one or more central figures of the philosophical- anthropological tradition (Moss, 2006, 2014, this volume; Kruger, 1999, 2001, this volume; Pavesich, this volume). It is noteworthy that, as Fischer (2009b) points out, the philosophical anthropologists do not undertake this aim simply for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the other insights it provides - regarding, for instance, the epistemologicai subject, the relation between human beings and nature, the relation of human beings with one another, and the ontology of human beings and human concerns, including (for instance) norms, values, divinities, artifacts, concepts, human society, space, time, and death.

Each of the three founders of philosophical anthropology conducts this setting of human beings within the continuum of organic being in a different way.'® Scheler (1928a) attributes to all living things a vital impulse (Lebensdrang). He distinguishes human beings from other living things by the former's capacity to suspend this impulse and experience things 'objectively'.'^ This gives them access to a world {Welt) rather than merely to an environment {Umwelt), including a realm of spirit {Geisf). On Scheler's view, Geist, following a revised sense of the Hegelian meaning of that term, is the realm of persons, their acts (including emotive and expressive as well as cognitive acts), and their mutual understanding and communication. For Scheler, Geist is in principle irreducible to physical

These differences have been discussed extensively elsewhere: for instance, Fischer (2009b) and Honenberger (2013). I provide only a brief sketch of them here.

Scheler's Lebensdrang appears to be a conceptual descendent of Bergson's ilan vital, as presented in Bergson (1907).

12 Phillip Honenberger

matter or organic life (Scheler, 1976 [1913,1916]; 1980 [1926]). Plessner (1928) distinguishes living from non-living beings by the form of relation between core and boundary in each case: living things exhibit (phenom­enologically) a deeper interiority than non-living things, as well as a dynamic rather than static relationship between core and boundary. Human beings are distinguished from non-human forms of life by their capacity to take a position regarding this dynamic relationship itself. For this reason, Plessner describes the human mode of life as an 'excentric positionality': human beings can take a position about their position. This involves unique ways of relating to their bodies, to their environ­ments, time and space, and one another.^® Gehlen (1940) describes the human being as an 'undetermined animal' (following Nietzsche [1886], §62), as well as a 'deficient being' (Mangelwesen), and elucidates these characterizations through three different lines of argument: evolu­tionary, developmental, and social. The first line of argument proceeds through appeal to a neoteny thesis, favored by the anatomists Louis Bolk and Adolf Portmann, among others, that human beings are bom in an especially 'undeveloped' state, in comparison with other primates, and thus that, in some sense, the socioculturally mediated environment of the human infant's first year of life constitutes a 'second womb'. The second line of argument builds on developmental psychological litera­ture to argue that human action involves a distinct and characteristic form of behavior that Gehlen calls 'relief [Entlastung]: namely, formation of habits that allow a winnowing and channeling of the 'overburdening' multitude of sensations that would otherwise cripple action. The devel­opment of linguistic abilities and (in the third line of argument) the close coupling of institutionally established regularities with individual patterns of choice and expectation, lead to the formation of an inte­grated habit-set, or 'character' [Haltung]. These processes are explained by Gehlen as instances of the characteristic and relatively distinctive human capacity (and need, from a biological standpoint) for relief.^®

(c) Conditions of the epistemic and practical subjectA final characteristic aim of philosophical anthropology is to reveal the significance of anfhropos ('the human') for classical philosophical

See essays by Davis and Kriiger, this volume, for discussion of Plessner's views on this theme.

« See essays by Schacht and Wasmuth, this volume, for further discussion of Gehlen's view and its applications.

Introduction 13

questions. This significance derives from the recognition of at least a near-identity (even if a contingent rather than a necessary one) between anfhropos and the classical philosophical subject - the subject of ethics and epistemology, for instance. Schnadelbach (1984) emphasizes this aim in his reading of the tradition when he writes:

Philosophical anthropology belongs to the history of the crisis caused by the 'collapse of Idealism' for the traditional self-inter­pretation of man, and it forms in a certain sense the terminating point of that history (p.220).... [One may characterize] philosoph­ical anthropology as an answer to the question, 'Who are we?,' in which, for reasons derived from the history of science, empirical and interpretive knowledge enter into a particular constellation [emphasis added]... [T]he scepticism with regard to the traditional self-image of man, from which Scheler, Plessner, and many of their contempo­raries start, is accompanied by scepticism with regard to all attempts to resolve the 'crisis of Ego' with the traditional philosophical or reflexive self-certainty: hence the precarious connexion of the philo­sophical with the empirical elements in the concept of a philosoph­ical anthropology, (p. 224)^°

This aim is best appreciated by reflection on the state of philosophy at the time that the foundational figures first presented their philosoph­ical anthropologies. The comprehensive speculative systems of German Idealism and Naturphilosophie had been eclipsed by a materialist and

, empiricist turn in the natural sciences and a similar turn in the socialsciences (as evidenced, for instance, by Karl Marx, August Comte, and Herbert Spencer). These sciences, through their empirical success and

i their affiliation with (and usefulness for) the growing institutionalI framework of industrial capitalism (Strydom, 2013, p. 107), increasingly

acquired philosophical defenders, who claimed for the sciences' descrip­tions and models an epistemological and ontological sufficiency and completeness. At the same time, in an effort to remain faithful to intel-

I lectual developments both in the natural and social sciences, on the onehand, and "humanistic" inquiries (such as linguistics, ethnology, and source-critical history), on the other, the Kantian tradition expanded

“ This heightened awareness of the significance of anthropology to philosophy should not be mistaken for an anthropocentrism, a point made by Schnadelbach himself (1984, p. 234).

1

14 Phillip Honenberger

and become subtler. Neo-Kantianism thus pursued an expanded 'crit­ical' project that would articulate the conditions of possibility, and thus constitutive limits and division of epistemic authority, of knowledge in the new disciplines. The work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Hermann Cohen, exemplify this trend.

These developments led to a new appreciation for the complexity of the relation between the human being as 'epistemological subject' and as 'epistemological object', a distinction that was pivotal to the Kantian epistemological framework. Indeed, the dialectic between subject and object became so complex as to reach a kind of breaking point.^' At the same time, and for the same fundamental reason, reductive idealisms and materialisms were increasingly challenged: the factors that would have to be considered in making coherent sense of, for instance, Fechner's psycho­physics, made such one-dimensional views prima fade implausible.

The philosophical anthropologists sought to cut through this Gordian knot by starting from a clarification of the increasingly puzzling subject-object doublet - that is, the human being.^^ This allowed them to continue the trend (clearly already underway in nineteenth-cen­tury philosophy) towards an identification of the conditions - socio­cultural, linguistic, biological, technological, and so on - of human cognition and agency, and thus of the 'philosophical subject' (in the Kantian-Hegelian sense) in one or another instance. The interplay of variability and universality in the appearance of this subject was an explicit focus of the philosophical anthropologists' concern. Their attentiveness to anthropos allowed them to provide innovative system­atic solutions to a special kind of 'coherence problem' that emerged in late-modern thought - namely, how human beings and the social and cultural systems associated with them could both be a part of relatively stable ontologies and slow-moving processes (such as those of evolu­tionary and physical-cosmological history) and at the same time be relatively undetermined and 'free'. Plessner's notion of ex-centricity, his

“ Hegel, in his critique of Kant's critical philosophy, had argued for the inev­itability of a breakdown of this kind well in advance of later developments, but the appearance of new and specific cases of breakdown within the emerging and increasingly empowered empirical sciences both lent greater weight to an argu­ment of this form and necessitated the revision of Hegel's specific systematic efforts at a solution to the problem.

Compare Foucault (1970 [1966]), who describes man, as he appears in the late modern (post-1800) human sciences, as an 'empirico-transcendental doublet' (p. 318, and ch. 9, §§2, 4).

Introduction 15

later notion of the 'homo absconditus' (Plessner, 1969), and Gehlen's notion of the human being as 'undetermined animal' bear witness to a concern with this problem.^^

In this way, philosophical anthropology has also harbored, as one of its major characteristic aims, the project of constructing an effective orientation to a variety of epistemological, practical, and socio-political factors that are not normally considered within the same discourse or. inquiry. These factors include the hermeneutic and the naturalistic, the natural and the cultural, the transcendental and the empirical, and many other pairings that cross familiar divides between methodologies, as well as ontologies, in modem intellectual life. It could even be argued that the focus of the tradition on 'the human subject' emerged as a conse­quence of this original strategy of response to nineteenth-century scien­tific developments (again, see Schnadelbach, 1984). Even if this focus on 'the human' is today recognized to be more questionable than it was in the intellectual context of the 1920s through 1950s, apprecia­tion of the larger problem it was intended to solve may somewhat miti­gate the strength of that objection to the tradition's self-formulation.^^ It is instructive, in this regard, that the discipline of anthropology (in general) is not intrinsically restricted to anthropocentric or humanist procedures or self-conceptions.

Philosophical anthropology as field: an attempt at a definition

Those seeking to make contributions to philosophical anthropology as a field (rather than the tradition initiated by Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen) define 'philosophical anthropology' itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most common among these is 'philosophical inquiry into human nature'. Schacht (1990), for instance, writes of 'philosophical anthro­pology, understood very broadly as the philosophical examination of human nature' (p. 159), and Pihlstrom (2003) writes of 'philosophical anthropology, i.e., philosophical study of humanity ("human nature")" (p. 259). Haeffner (1989 [1982]) claims that '[pjhilosophical anthro­pology stands for the path of knowledge concerned with the nature or

“ More recently, see Moss (2014), and Moss's essay in this volume.^ See, for instance, the recent literature on 'post-humanism' (such as Wolfe,

2010, and Braidotti, 2013), which is not doctrinaily or methodologicaily so far from philosophical anthropology as might be assumed.

16 Phillip Honenberger

essence of human beings: the typical form of existence, the inner struc­ture and dynamics, and other concerns' (p. 4). The expression 'human nature' has problematically narrow implications, however, implying that the field of philosophical anthropology must be committed to essen- tialism, or self-restricted to a concern with the 'natural' or 'innate' side of human existence. The authors just quoted do not intend such impli­cations and even explicitly warn against them; nonetheless, the English term 'human nature' strongly inclines us to this misunderstanding,

1 suggest defining the field of philosophical anthropology simply as the 'philosophy of man', or, to use a (thankfully) gender-neutral expres­sion, 'philosophy of the human'. This treats philosophical anthropology as an analogue of such disciplines as 'philosophy of art', 'philosophy of language', and 'philosophy of mind'. Note that in many of these fields, the character and identity-conditions of the central subject matter are themselves topics of controversy. In philosophy of art, for instance, a central, open, and controversial question is, 'What is art?' By analogy with these disciplines, a central (but not the only) question in philo­sophical anthropology is, 'What is man?' (or, 'What is a human being?' and 'What is humanity?').

Insofar as human beings and 'the human' can be objects of many different kinds of concern, it might be worried that philosophical anthro­pology is, by this definition, too broadly defined to be considered a single field. However, some widely recognized sub-disciplines in contemporary philosophy - such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics - have equally broad if not broader scopes of concern: plausibly summarized as 'reality', 'knowledge', and 'value', respectively. If these can be fields, it could be argued, why cannot there also be a field of philosophical anthropology as defined above? Indeed, if philosophical anthropology so-defined is of a scope comparable to that of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, this even provides evidence of its high importance, in comparison with other philosophical sub-disciplines - an importance that, as we've seen, the tradition of philosophical anthropology has itself tended to claim. This seems to be the way that Kant conceived of what later became known as the field of philosophical anthropology when he wrote, in an oft-quoted passage of his lecture course on Logic,

The field of philosophy... may be reduced to the following questions:1. What can I know?2. What ought I to do?3. What may I hope?4. What is man?

Introduction 17

The first question is answered by metaphysics, the second by morals,the third by religion, and the fourth by anthropology.

I would further argue that the field of philosophical anthropology is not well captured by the phrase 'philosophy of anthropology', nor, as has recently been suggested, 'philosophy-in-anthropology' (Brezina, 2013). These locutions would make the field analogous to disciplines focused on bodies of knowledge or institutional knowledge-forma­tions (as in philosophy of science or philosophy of psychology) or to philosophical interventions within those bodies of knowledge and knowledge-formations (as would be philosophy-in-science or philoso­phy-in-psychology). On the reading given here, philosophical anthro­pology is as much analogous to the philosophy of nature or philosophy of mind, as to the philosophy of science, philosophy of psychology, philos­ophy-in-science, or philosophy-in-psychology - though obviously there are close relationships between these disciplines. Philosophical anthro­pology, on the definition proposed here, collects all philosophical inquiries into the human. At the very least, assimilating philosophical anthropology to 'philosophy of anthropology' or 'philosophy-in-an­thropology' would miss important features and open questions of the field as it is frequently and self-consciously practiced.

Why should we care about philosophical anthropology as field? One convincing reason may be that we have to. In addressing many other questions and topics, ideas about human beings - for instance, their capabilities, tendencies, and relations with other things (whether causal, constitutive, intentional, social, historical, or otherwise) - are impli­cated. In this way, whatever is said or thought about these matters has philosophical anthropology as a transcendental condition of its own possibility (compare Pihlstrom, 1998, 2003, and essay.in this volume). These implicit commitments can always, in principle, be made explicit and reflected upon. Thus the field is potentially highly relevant even in many cases where it is never discussed explicitly. With the caveat that such explication may sometimes disrupt rather than contribute to forms of knowing (compare Polanyi, 2009 [1966]) and other values we may

“ Kant (1885 [1800], p. 15). Kant goes on to write that '[I]n reality, however, all these might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last' (p. 15). This is a claim that Heidegger (1990 [1929]) found highly ques­tionable. A more precise discussion of the relationships between metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology Is bound to be controver­sial and would require space beyond that allotted to this introduction.

18 Phillip Honenberger

hold (compare Plessner, 1969), it is plausible that these assumptions and commitments ought to be made explicitly and critically reflected upon somewhere in the intellectual landscape.

Summary of the chapters

Chapters 1-5 approach figures or texts within the tradition of philosoph­ical anthropology primarily from a historical or text-critical perspective; Chapters 6-10 are primarily concerned to engage contemporary issues or controversies, and draw on the tradition or field of philosophical anthro­pology as tools in this engagement. This division is not a perfect one: parts of the first five essays are clearly devoted to contemporary issues and controversies, just as many of the last five help us to understand the history of the tradition. But the distinction of emphasis between a focus on the past and on the present serves as a useful principle for an initial ordering.

The first chapter, written by Beth Cykowski, compares the basic project of philosophical anthropology with Heidegger's views in the late 1920s, particularly in his lectures on the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929-1930), well known and much discussed for their thesis that 'the stone lacks world', 'the animal is poor in world', and 'the human being has world'. Cykowski reveals the extent to which Heidegger, despite his explicit self-distancing from philosophical anthropology in these lectures and elsewhere, is actually involved in a very similar problem­atic and, to a great extent (though, significantly, not entirely), comes to similar conclusions. The critical comparison and contrast between Heidegger's favored terminology and concepts, on the one hand, and those of philosophical anthropology, on the other, makes Cykowski's essay especially useful as an introduction to philosophical anthropology in the context of twentieth-century European philosophy.

Richard Schacht's essay on Gehlen and Nietzsche presents central features of Nietzsche's work as an anticipation of Gehlen's version of philosophical anthropology, and presents Gehlen's work as a continua­tion and systematization of many of Nietzsche's anthropological insights. Schacht does not miss the opportunity to stress Nietzsche and Gehlen's common concern with 'naturalization' in the sense of Nietzsche's project to 'translate man back into nature' (1966 [1886], §230), nor their common concern with the role of the social in constituting and qual­ifying that setting. Schacht also notes a difference between the goals that Gehlen and Nietzsche suppose are definitive of human ways of life, with Gehlen setting 'survival' as the ultimate explanatory heuristic, and

I

Nietzsche resting his analysis rather on the 'will to power'. Likewise, Gehlen is relatively more pessimistic about human beings' ability to adapt to new or uncertain institutional formations than is Nietzsche.

Vida Pavesich's essay provides acritical overview of Hans Blumenberg's 'phenomenological anthropology', showing how Blumenberg, in his writings on myth, rhetoric, and elsewhere, transposed the themes of Gehlen's model of the human being as a 'deficient creature' and Paul,

I Alsberg's notion of human culture as 'distancing', into a phenomeno-I logical register. For Blumenberg, on Pavesich's account, consolation is a[ phenomenon that characterizes human existence (in the Heideggerian

sense), and the various practices, institutions, and symbolisms of myth, religion, rhetoric, and philosophy, provide such existential consolation in the form of a 'distancing' from contingency and the fact of death, including through such mechanisms as conceptualiza­tion and 'time-saving'. This perspective motivates a reinterpretation

I of reason as rhetoric and ratiocination - no longer a harbinger of abso-' lute certainty, yet still an existential and anthropological necessity -

and suggests the importance, in ethics, of recognizing and protecting vulnerabilities.

Phillip Honenberger critically compares a number of late-modern answers to the question, 'What is the human place in the world?', looking particularly closely at the views of Thomas Henry Huxley, Max

j Scheler, and the contemporary 'pluralists' Huw Price and Helen Longino.I Honenberger notes the variety of things that the language of 'place' can! mean in the phrase 'the human place in the world' and related locutions.

Drawing on aspects of the views of Scheler, Plessner, and Lenny Moss, he argues for the superiority of an emergentist strategy of response to the main question itself, in contrast to familiar naturalist, non-naturalist, and pluralist alternatives. The advantage of an emergentist strategy derives, in brief, from its intention to simultaneously respect both the radical diversity of 'places' that human beings can occupy, on the one hand, and the rich interconnections - even impossibility of complete 'detachability' - between these, on the other.

Near the end of his paper, Honenberger mentions Plessner's philo­sophical anthropology as an instance of the sort of emergentist strategy he favors. Scott Davis's rich and challenging paper provides a more thorough overview of Plessner's views, presenting these not primarily

' as emergentist but rather as fellow travelers of structural and narrato-logical analyses. Davis focuses on Plessner's magnum opus Die Stufen

I des Organischen und derMensch (1928) and delineates five methodolog-I ical and conceptual themes in that text: (1) the structure of the text

Introduction 19

i

20 Phillip Honenberger

itself as an icon of self-reference (with self-reference also being one of the text's central substantive themes); (2) Plessner's original concept of 'positionality' as a spatial intensifier; (3) Plessner's methodology of drawing analytical conclusions from deliberately hypothetical or spec­ulative premises (that is, under the auspices of one more instances of the 'as if'); (4) Plessner's concept of 'mediated immediacy as an expres­sion of relations between what some contemporary theorists, following Gilles Deleuze, describe as 'the virtual' and 'the actual'; and, finally, (5) an interpretation of Plessner's famed concept of 'ex-centric position­ality' as a form of narrative interaction between human beings and their environments. Davis instructively highlights resonances between these five delineated themes of Plessner's work, on the one hand, and subse­quent intellectual developments in the fields of cultural anthropology (Claude L6vi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu), evolutionary biology (Mary Jane West-Eberhard), and cognitive science (Alva Noe; the extended mind thesis).

Davis's essay serves as an excellent transition to the remaining five essays of the volume, wherein contemporary questions and concerns take center stage. Sally Wasmuth sketches a model of addiction, based in part on Gehlen's philosophical anthropology - particu­larly, his understanding of the human being as a 'deficient creature' {Mdngelwesen) that needs the support of stable social institutions to develop an effective repertoire of patterned responses to environ­mental stimuli. Wasmuth shows how Gehlen's model, given the right interpretation, suggests two different directions in which human action can fail: by being too tightly bound to institutions and previ­ously formed habitual responses, on the one hand, and by being too untethered to any institutional or habitual guidance, on the other. Addictive behavior thus becomes understandable as a disconnection from those institutional structures that could give fuller meaning to one's life, and occupational therapy presents itself as a promising alternative to a number of prevalent treatments. Wasmuth further conjectures that a model such as Gehlen's could help solve a puzzle that addiction theorists and researchers have long faced: namely, the source and validity of normative judgments about addiction and its distinction from 'healthy' behaviors.

Moss's essay seeks to extend and place contemporary philosophical anthropology on a new footing through donation of a new set of inter­related concepts, most prominently that of 'detachment' (see also Moss, 2006, 2014). Like Wasmuth, Moss also addresses the classical philo­sophical-anthropological Mdngelwesen thesis from the standpoint of its

Introduction 21

lessons for contemporary inquires, but rather suggests a supplement to that thesis, in order to avoid a paradox in its standard articulations. Moss's concern is that the deficiency thesis alone appears to require that human beings 'break' from the continuum of natural processes. Moss's solution for restoring continuity - and thus more effectively articulating the 'place' of human beings within nature - is to follow and extend recent suggestions about human evolutionary history, to posit a stage, (roughly associated with the appearance of Homo erectus) wherein a new kind of group involvement (a 'Hominin superorganism') became a crucial mediating factor in the lives of individuals of the species. Moss reads Freud's views on group psychology and Heidegger's notion of 'the they' {Das Man) as expressing affective and existential dimensions of human beings' involvement in such a superorganism. However, to understand subsequent human biological and civilizational history, on Moss's account, a second stage (a 'second detachment') must also be posited: one wherein human individuals achieve, particularly through language, enhanced abilities of self-differentiation from the superorgan- ismic groups to which they originarily belong. Moss notes the way that a Hegelian view of 'explicitation' gives voice to this second detachment characteristic of Homo sapiens sapiens' form of life.

Kruger's essay also takes up the problematic of human evolutionary and civilizational history, as well as models of individual human ontogenesis. Kruger's main charge is to critically review, evaluate, and philosophically extend and qualify, Michael Tomasello's recent work in comparative primatology, particularly his efforts to specify (that is, distinguish) human beings' powers and behaviors from those of non­human primates. In taking up this project, Kruger draws upon and compares Tomasello's views to those of Helmuth Plessner. He concludes with sympathetic accolades to Tomasello's project, but also gestures towards those issues on which it may require philosophical supple­mentation or qualification - particularly regarding large, complex, and historically contingent social groupings (such as nations and civiliza­tional traditions); epistemological and metaphysical aspects of reflex- ivity, symbolism, and socially mediated experience; and the difficulty of construing the identification of 'enabling' conditions as 'naturalistic' explanations (as Tomasello, to some extent, seems to do in the cases of the relation between 'joint attention' and 'culture').

The final two essays of the collection do not discuss the tradition of philosophical anthropology, but rather propose novel and suggestive moves within the ongoing field. Margolis's essay takes up the canon­ical late-modern question of the relation between biology and culture.

r

22 Phillip Honenberger

arguing that the logics of standard biological disciplines - such as molecular biology - are fundamentally different from those of cultural disciplines; and yet, complications in achieving the once-dreamed-of highly linear and regularized (law-based) explanatory models in the former, imply the equally unlikely discovery of such models in the latter. Margolis contrasts E.O. Wilson's and Lenny Moss's judgments on the relation between DNA and 'higher-level' biological and cultural phenomena in order to make the point for biology: an appreciation of the diversity of ways in which molecular systems can function, as shown by Moss, makes (on Margolis's argument) Wilson-like dreams of a reduction of biology alone to any single explanatory framework, as well as (thus even more so) of culture to a biological framework, extremely implausible. Margolis further argues that this conclusion, if valid, precludes the legitimacy of Kantian (transcendental) regimenta­tions of biological concepts, discourses, or models, as much as it does classically reductive ones.

Finally, Sami Pihlstrdm's essay sketches some features of 'philo­sophical thanatology' (that is, philosophy of death) as a crucial aspect of philosophical anthropology. Pihlstrom's essay stresses the way in which a transcendental perspective on death, wherein the direc­tion of one's life and its finitude may in principle always be called into mind and into question, allows us to approach the problem of death in a manner that simultaneously pays due heed to various of its naturalistic, existential, cultural, and pragmatic dimensions. In this regard, Pihlstrom's approach to death shows the analytical power of his own philosophical anthropology as he has developed it in earlier works. This philosophical anthropology incorporates transcendental and naturalistic perspectives within an overarching pragmatism. Pihlstrom's essay further serves as an especially insightful new over­view of the defining problematics of the field of philosophical anthro­pology in general, with reference to the concrete test case (or case study) of death. Of particular note is Pihlstrom's new discussion of his influential fourfold typology of philosophical anthropologies (in Pihlstrdm, 2003) drawn from Heikki Kannisto: essentialist, naturalist, existentialist, and cuituralist.

We hope that readers will find this collection especially noteworthy for the diversity and sophistication of the essays contained therein, as well as for the great and general significance of its central themes. We leave it to them to determine whether our hopes have been fulfilled.

Introduction 23

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