A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstances; and whose interpretations are, in turn, determined (...) by webs of belief built from somewhat heterogeneous streams of incoming ideas. This anthropology, then, has two components. Ideational heterogeneity undermines the aspiration of technocracy to predict human behavior and the aspiration of social science to arrive at lawlike generalizations about it. Ideational determinism, however, which is less important than ideational heterogeneity to the critique of technocracy, may be more important to generating epistemological approaches to other forms of politics, all of which involve the actions of human beings who, as such, are largely at the mercy of the fallible ideas to which they have been exposed. (shrink)

Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature and tasks philosophy with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault's critique of the human sciences, Vanessa Lemm discusses the reception of Nietzsche's naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. She offers an original reading of homo natura that brings back the ancient Greek idea of nature and sexuality as creative chaos and of the philosophical life as outspoken and (...) embodied truth, perhaps best exemplified by the Cynics' embrace of social and cultural transformation. (shrink)

This chapter relates Kierkegaard’s views on anthropology and selfhood to Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical anthropology. It focuses on Kierkegaard’s contribution to anthropology, and discusses the relation between philosophical and theological anthropology in Kierkegaard. The chapter gives a synopsis of these issues by focusing on The Sickness unto Death, although important elements of this work are anticipated by Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. After an historical introduction and brief remarks on Kierkegaard’s method, the (...) chapter moves to human nature, selfhood, and despair in The Sickness unto Death. We will see that human nature is interpreted as a synthesis of opposites, whereas selfhood requires self-consciousness and higher-order volition. Nevertheless, The Sickness unto Death approaches selfhood and anthropology negatively by focusing on despair, a deficient form of agency that involves double-mindedness. Kierkegaard argues that despair can only be overcome by wholeheartedness and religious faith. Whereas Part I of The Sickness unto Death provides a philosophical anthropology that distinguishes between inauthentic (non-conscious) and authentic (conscious) despair, Part II develops a theological anthropology that focuses on faith and despair before God. Part I analyses and criticizes various forms of despair on their own terms, whereas Part II identifies despair with sin on the presupposition of divine revelation. Overall, The Sickness unto Death provides a systematic analysis of despair that has been influential in continental philosophy and theology. It is a fascinating contribution to anthropology and theories of selfhood because of its typology and negativistic phenomenology. On the one hand, the analysis of non-conscious despair provides an intriguing account of self-deception, facticity, and freedom. On the other, the analysis of demonic despair—which does evil because it is evil—appears to challenge the widespread idea that all intentional action is prompted by something that appears good). (shrink)

This paper aims to pay tribute to Figal’s comprehensive and innovative analysis of the artwork and beauty, while challenging both his realist position on the immediacy of meaning and his monist stance that reduces sublimity to beauty. To enquire into the origin of aesthetic feelings and sense, and thus, to break the hermeneutic circle, we first trace the origin of this reduction to the reception of Burke’s concept of the sublime by Mendelssohn and Kant. We then recur to Husserl and (...) Dufrenne to trace the origin of the sense of the feeling of sublimity in the realm of affectivity or sensuousness. This genesis takes place in passive experience, where we identify an excess of sensuous sense over categorial meaning that is constitutive of the affective sense that our bodily sensations give to hyletic material. It is argued that this sensuous excess evokes a sublime experience in the phenomenological sense, involving an affective and disruptive bodily experience and an endless process of sense formation. Affective or sensuous sense is thus an event that irreversibly affects the bodily surface. To elucidate this phenomenon, we draw on the theoretical framework of Breton and Bataille, positing it as a form-transgressive ‘convulsive’ sublime, which we then illustrate in the architectural works of Tschumi and Eisenman. In short, we have retrieved the origin of aesthetic experience and redefined the feeling of the sublime as a phenomenological ‘convulsive’ sublimity. (shrink)

Historians have long since rejected the dubious assertions of the conflict model, with its narratives of perennial religion versus science combat. Nonetheless, this theory persists in various academic disciplines, and it is still presented to university students as the authoritative historical account of religion–science interactions. Cases of this can be identified within modern anthropology textbooks and reference materials, which often recapitulate claims once made by John W. Draper and Andrew D. White. This article examines 21st-century introductory anthropology publications, (...) demonstrating how such works perpetuate religion–science myths and the notion that history has been replete with inevitable religion versus science warfare. In particular, this study reveals how such introductory materials propagate discord narratives associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Affiliated with these anecdotes are oversimplified accounts of religious responses to heliocentrism and evolutionary theory, as well as claims that science has invariably led to the usurpation of religious belief and secularization from Galileo onwards. (shrink)

The traditional claim that Christ is one person who is both divine and human might seem inconsistent with classical conceptions of understanding divinity and humanity. For example, the classical understanding of divinity would seem to require us to hold that divine beings are immaterial, while the classical understanding of humanity would seem to require us to hold that human beings are material, leaving us unable to speak consistently of one person who is divine and human both. This paper argues that (...) revised versions of classical theism and classical anthropology can be developed, versions that avoid these problems. (shrink)

Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammer of Social Conflicts (reviewed by Christopher Zurn).

In this essay I show that Kant intended his anthropology lectures and book, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, to be a Klugheitslehre (theory of prudence). The essay draws on many quotes from these sources to show that Kant wanted to develop a theory of how to use other people for one’s own ends. Although so much of the lectures and book are in conversation with Baumgarten’s empirical psychology, there are enough references to Klugheit (prudence) and klug (...) (clever) action to support this thesis. Prudence is a skill that human beings should develop and hence is not excluded from human life even though it is not the basis of morality. The purpose of Klugheit is to achieve happiness but the means to that happiness involves using other people for one’s own ends. In order to use others as a means to one’s own ends, a person must in someway satisfy the inclinations of the other person so that they cooperate in one’s ends. However it is also possible to dominate another person and use them as well if they are dominated by a passion but this is not prudent since it does not achieve happiness except in the case of a husband and wife. Kant’s distinction between Weltklugheit and Privatklugheit also appears to be confirmed in that he advances the idea that sociable means of gaining the cooperation of others (Privatklugheit) leads to the lasting happiness of a person and to the development of civilization. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Internationales Jahrbuch für philosophische Anthropologie Jahrgang: 7 Heft: 1 Seiten: 53-66.

This simulating book gathers five lectures that ask questions of the broadest general intellectual interest: What is religion? Do other peoples have the same emotional states as we do? Why do humans make use of body imagery? In Circumstantial Deliveries, Rodney Needham shows that the comparative study of societies may furnish the answers. Circumstantial Deliveries challenges the methodology and substance of many conventional ideas about human nature and calls for more radical and comparative analyses. For instance, the author discredits the (...) notion that to primitive peoples the colors red, white, and black symbolize blood, semen, and feces, respectively, arguing that an extensive comparative study of primitive societies discovered no such relationship. These essays sound a common theme: "If a deeper appreciation of the value of life can be had from reading Crime and Punishment, or if a more acute assessment of the springs of action can be acquired from Hamlet, then in principle it should be conceded that like benefits may be derived from a sympathetic observation of other men engaged in their daily affairs.". (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the “dynamic functionalism” of Dewey’s evolutionary approach to ethics – moral norms emerge to address specific problems but must be constantly readjusted to changing contexts – had its roots in the comparative jurisprudence of Sir Henry Sumner Maine and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. First, I will discuss the rise of the comparative sciences in the nineteenth century, part of the backdrop for the work of Maine and various evolutionary anthropologists. Next, I will examine Maine’s (...) Ancient Law (1861), Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), and Holmes’s The Common Law (1881), three related books that set up a dichotomy between existing custom and historical progress. Finally, I will show how this dichotomy was reflected in Dewey’s writing and teaching at the University of Michigan in the early 1890s, including “Anthropology and Law” (1893) and several courses in political philosophy. (shrink)

In Marking Time, Paul Rabinow presents his most recent reflections on the anthropology of the contemporary. Drawing richly on the work of Michel Foucault, John Dewey, Niklas Luhmann, and, most interestingly, German painter Gerhard Richter, Rabinow offers a set of conceptual tools for scholars examining cutting-edge practices in the life sciences, security, new media and art practices, and other emergent phenomena. Taking up topics that include bioethics, anger and competition among molecular biologists, the lessons of the Drosophila genome, the (...) nature of ethnographic observation in radically new settings, and the moral landscape shared by scientists and anthropologists, Rabinow shows how anthropology remains relevant to contemporary debates. By turning abstract philosophical problems into real-world explorations and offering original insights, Marking Time is a landmark contribution to the continuing re-invention of anthropology and the human sciences. (shrink)

This is the first book to explore the relationship between Martin Heidegger's work and modern anthropology. Heidegger attracts much scholarly interest among social scientists, but few have explored his ideas in relation to current anthropological debates. The discipline's modernist foundations, the nature of cultural constructionism and of art ñ even what an anthropology of art must include ñ are all informed and illuminated by Heidegger's work. The author argues that many contemporary anthropologists, in their concern to return subjectivity (...) and 'voice' to their interlocutors, neglect to recognize that language and other representational practices conceal the world and human subjectivity as much as reveal it. The author also suggests that Heidegger's critique of western technology provides the basis for a return to anthropology's sociological foundations. Emerging from over ten years of original research, and drawing on a rich knowledge of Australian and Melanesian ethnography, this book reassesses the underlying framework of modern and, particularly, visual anthropology. Innovative and provocative, it will be of interest to all anthropologists, philosophers and students of art and culture. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology emerges, partly at least, by dissatisfied and critical followers of Husserl’s phenomenology, such as Max Scheler and the young Martin Heidegger. They were dissatisfied with what they saw as a disregard of the concrete human being as an essential part of phenomenological analysis. They tried instead to claim that philosophy must search for, and anchor, its foundations exclusively in the human being, not as an abstract entity, but as an existential, concrete, physical being. In this specific philosophical, (...) as well as historical, context this paper suggests to locate Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical project by reconstructing his unique version of philosophical anthropology. The main aim of the paper is to describe and understand the way Blumenberg combines his theory of metaphors together with his anthropological considerations regarding the origin and emergence of human culture into his own version of philosophical anthropology. A version that can be seen as joining the original attempt of philosophical anthropology to overcome the deficiency in Husserl’s phenomenological project. (shrink)

The question that I want to debate a little in this paper could be put in this way: what, and how much, empirical information is required for, or relevant to, moral philosophy? That question may well strike one as somewhat vague and woolly. Rightly so. What is needed to get rather clearer about its answer or possible answers is chiefly, I believe, to get clearer about its sense.

Evil may be said to be shadowy, mysterious, covert, and associated with night, darkness, secrecy. It is a force acting to destroy the integrity, happiness and welfare of 'normal' society. It is at once the cause and the explanation of misfortune, of the wretchedness of human existence, and of our own individual wrongdoing. That, at any rate, is substantially the western Christian (and pre-Christian) view.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Philosophical Anthropology of Nonhuman AnimalsKalpana SeshadriIn medieval iconography, the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simian dei [ape of God]. In Linnaeus’s optical machine, whoever refuses to recognize himself in the ape, becomes one: to paraphrase Pascal, qui fait l’homme, fait le singe [he who acts the man, acts the ape].—Giorgio Agamben, Man and Animal[It is] then, not (...) just about animals. It concerns whether or not we can conceive of ethical relationships beyond either continuism or separatism, beyond identity politics or abyssal alterity.—Kelly Oliver, Animal LessonsI owe a deep debt of gratitude to the authors of the four provocative and challenging papers on HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, not only for their thoughtful consideration of my work, but for pinpointing and interrogating an uncertain “failure” in my text, namely the absence of the animal as such. David Wood asks if it would be unfair to characterize HumAnimal as a work of “anthropocentric posthumanism.” Ellen Armour, too, wonders about animals and where they figure in my project. She suggests that HumAnimal doesn’t “quite cross the putative line between humans and animals as such,” but [End Page 197] she immediately and generously qualifies the observation as a “good thing, a productive thing.” Rebecca Tuvel, on the other hand, worries that in following Agamben, I appear to uphold “the binary logic that posits animals in opposition to humans because they lack language.” Animals, she suggests, “do seem to communicate with us in important ways, ways that are worth hearing.” These astute comments undoubtedly hit the mark; HumAnimal has nothing to say about animals as such, and despite the lure of the title, there is nary a squeak nor a snout that scuttles between the covers.Rather than explain or defend this absence, let me turn to the title of this response: Why a philosophical anthropology rather than a zoology of animals? Obviously, there is a paradox inherent in calling for an anthropology of autozoōn, instead of a philosophical zoology. The latter would perhaps entail theories of evolution and animal behavior, research areas better left to natural scientists than to philosophers and critical thinkers. The problem with zoology is the way in which the philosophical question is supplanted by biological fact. An anthropology of animals on the other hand, would mean that we focus on the question of what it means to be something. In other words, my sense is that the question of the animal in philosophy can only be raised as a question of human propriety. To lose sight of the fraught co-implication of human propriety and animal alterity is to lose sight of the contribution that philosophy can make to hum(an)animal studies. Thus, where the animal is concerned what we must think is not merely whether the animal has language, whether we are in some kind of biological or social continuity with it, or whether between the animal and human is a condition of implacable alterity, a gulf that cannot be breached. We must also think the kind of necessity charged by the animal as such for thought or for any thinking to take place, and for any interrogation of (human) being. In other words, to follow Derrida in his deconstruction of the animal as such, the animal that is only a word, (l’animot) an abstraction that refers to nothing and everything, an idea of nonhuman life predicated on the ideal of man, must we not abandon, once and for all, the natural attitude toward animals? Must we not begin with the acknowledgment that the animal as such cannot be spoken of, that animals as such do not exist, but what exists is the signifier “animal” as the necessary correlative to any thought, construction or deconstruction of human-being? And that now in our current epoch of posthumanism, the strategic concept of “the natural animal” serves as an inconceivable ideal directing our ethics and our politics? Thus, I suggest that what we must contend with today, what must be encountered not once and for all but repeatedly, is the logical non sequitur that confronts us; that is... (shrink)

The complexity of our ‘object’ of study, leading to the question ‘what is really the city?’ requires the use of different levels of analyses. At the same time, a way must be found to develop an explanatory model that brings together the knowledge thus produced. The study of governance in the city is necessarily part of any research aimed at investigating empirically the processes regulating the social life. The key implication is to address its impact; a task made particularly complex (...) by the often difficult relationship between the implementation of governance and the interaction with a diversity of societal actors, for the ongoing dialectic between the formal and the informal in urban life. We often find that this dialectic produces ambiguity, unexpected results, gaps between planned objectives, and competition instead of cooperation among actors, pointing to the weakness of the rationalistic model of public action. Perhaps the most important lesson that we have learnt about government and governance is that the delusion that we feel when trying to understand urban policies results from our incapacity fully to grasp the complexity of human life. (shrink)

In 1866, six Inuits were taken to the United States for the purpose of serving as specimens to American scientists at the Natural History Museum. Shortly after their arrival in New York, four of them had died. One of the survivors returned to the Arctic, while the sixth, Minik, now alone, fought to make possible the return of the remains of his dead companions to their village. Since the latter were being exhibited, as was then often the case (and happens (...) even today in many museums), in order to offer visitors examples of the Inuk people, Minik protested in vain. In 1909 he returned to Greenland when the scientists denied that the remains of his friends still existed. Several years later, still pursuing the issue, he went back to the United States to take up the fight against the bureaucracy for the repatriation of the bodies. He died in the United States in 1918. It was only in 1993 that he won out and that the remains of the four were returned to the Arctic homeland. (shrink)