Abstract

Philosophical anthropology is a distinctive discipline established in the 1920s-30s by German thinkers. It arose as an attempt to integrate various philosophical methods and theories and to confirm the synthetic conception of man by scientific data from fields such as biology, psychology, ethnology, and sociology. The task was to use the ideas and information about man provided by religious and historical experience, philosophical speculation, and scientific research to develop a general theory of man that would be comprehensive enough to qualify for philosophical status and grounded enough empirically to qualify for scientific status. This ambitious program ran into various difficulties some of which are discussed in the selections in this issue of our journal.