The Bakhtin Circle’s conception of language is very much still alive, still productive, in the language sciences today. My claim in this paper is that to understand the Bakhtin Circle’s continuing relevance to the language sciences, we have to look beyond the linguistic theory itself, to the philosophical groundwork laid for this project by Bakhtin in what he himself referred to as his philosophical anthropology. This philosophical anthropology, at the center of which (...) stands an architectonics of self—other relations, opens the door for a radical rethinking of what language is and how it works; a rethinking that in turn opens up and coincides with new directions being explored in the language sciences today. Within the context of Bakhtin scholarship, this paper also argues for taking Bakhtin’s early philosophical works more seriously when discussing the Bakhtin Circle’s conception of language. (shrink)

The essays assembled here are all very early and differ in a number of ways from Bakhtin's previously published work.

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," (...) the difference between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse--all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. Toward a Philosophy of the Act will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The study is aimed at the "philosophy of translation" methodology outlining as an original philosophical texts translation tool from the point of view of culture as anthropological phenomena, namely, individuals’ participating in the text creation process providing the consistent following tasks solution: a) clarifying the text author’s role, which is the object of recipients’ perception; b) the human psyche inexhaustible potential realization for the primary text semantic content understanding by the translator to prevent its distortion; c) defining the (...) requirements for the translation process as a mean of bringing the reader closer to author’s understanding by language barrier elimination as an intuitive "obstacle" on its way. _Theoretical basis._ The author proceeds from the factual absence of the "philosophy of translation" concept unambiguous definition in the modern anthropological and philosophical space and seeks to take into account all the factors affecting the newly created text quality due to the all participants’ features reviled on every stage of the text translation process. Today, the "philosophy of translation" is a widely used phrase, though ignoring the characteristics of man as a single meaning creator of the concept under study. The article provisions are based on philosophical, translation, and psychological studies with an emphasis on classical and non-classical anthropology research (Gadamer, Khoma, Holovach, Chepeleva, Dizdar, Leonov, Lotman, Bakhtin, etc.). _Originality._ The author proposes a methodology for the original philosophical text adaptation and presents a generalized step-by-step scheme for its translation, which helps to solve the personality of the researcher and/or translator’s influence problem on the individual author’s meaning preservation during its reproduction in a reader’s convenient language. _Conclusions._ A look at the "philosophy of translation" from the philosophical anthropology point of view allows us not only to consider the process of translation from the individual characteristics of all the participants (author/philosopher-reader-researcher/translator-reader-philosopher/reader) but also to describe such translation methodology by concentrating on highlighting the author’s reasoning course, which rises new knowledge and encourages further philosophical reflection within the human nature instability problem. The translation of a philosophical text not only reproduces the semantic structure of the original message but also provides a number of possible dialogical reactions to it as an object of human phenomenology. The proposed concept takes into account any reader’s needs, fully preserving the author’s position. (shrink)

Based on a newly conceptualized notion of the dialogical self, achieved by integrating Bakhtin's philosophical anthropology and Karmiloff-Smith's Representational Redescription model into the existing notion proposed by Hermans and colleagues, the present study focuses on examining the role of The Ox-Herding Pictures in cultivating the dialogical self. Methodologically, this study adopted the cultural-historical perspective and microdevelopmental approach of Vygotsky. In-depth case studies consisting of six interrelated phases of interviews and written responses were conducted. The results show that (...) such a unique cultural sign had different mediation effects upon subjects of different backgrounds. Two examples of considerable mediation effects are presented in more detail. A hermeneutical examination of this cultural object switched to a kind of self-representation in all cases, while the self-representation of all subjects developed from a less explicit to a more explicit level. Development of the dialogical self was characterized by its diversity in form and richness regarding content. (shrink)

Brian Gregor draws together a hermeneutics of the self—through Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor—and a theology of the cross—through Luther, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Jüngel.

This analysis places the English translation of Heinrich Popitz’s Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence in the broader tradition of philosophical anthropology. It is argued anthropological arguments such as that offered by Popitz give insights not otherwise available to strict disciplinary inquiries. Poptiz’s discussion of power also suggests an important tension in philosophical anthropology. While Popitz contends power relations are “humanly produced realities” not “imposed by nature,” he nevertheless provides some support that physical and biological (...) factors might contribute to an understanding of power. This discussion illustrates this tension using examples drawn from Popitz discussion of power, threats of violence, and the exercise of authority. (shrink)

Is freedom and capability enough to sustain our well-being? For human flourishing to progress, defer, and avoid decline, managers as persons must grow in virtue to transcend to the ultimate source of the good. In our definition of a person we develop an anthropology of gift through the communication of one self to another and whose form is love, the willing the good of the other. We ask four questions about the humanistic manager as a person: what is the (...) goal, end, good; what form, structure guides the manager; what materials, resources, technology, and context does the manager use within the structure to meet the end and exceed the goals, what is the means of effecting the change needed to meet the manager’s goals. Each of these questions form the basis to construct a philosophical anthropology of humanistic management. To these four questions we add three types of finality: the usual absolute terminal and horizontally immanent finalities plus the vertical finality of every growing and developing person among other persons in community. The need for a philosophical anthropology derives from a concomitant ethical requirement of what does and ought the manager, as person, undertake. What and how the person knows, wills, acts on provides the reality within which the manager, as person, operates. Along the way we will visit topics of transcendence, secularism, vulnerability, authentic personhood, and virtue. We conclude with a description, which is a dynamically evolving scheme of the meaning of a manager in the world, the social, and perhaps, the terminal goods of order. We move far from the _homo farber_ of a technology-led world whose thought conforms being. We have begun to extend our manager into the species _homo transcendens_ where being conforms thought and responsible action. We conclude with a sketch on the emerging role of spirituality in the workplace with connections to compassionate leadership, organizations as sites for healing and growth, and examples from the experience of humanistic organization who seem to have survived and thrived centuries of global operations. From an anthropology of gift we can identify several implications for managers. Humanistic management education would subsume the rational choice hegemony of economic modeling to a technological subset of tools, subject to the goals and nature of human persons. The scientism of thinking that psychology, sociology, political science, and economics would suitably describe, explain, and model human decisions would be replaced by an overarching framework leading to higher levels of knowledge, especially wisdom based educational experiences and content based on the natural integrity of human beings as learners. Since all technology follows, rather than leads, persons in an anthropology of gift, workplace practices would be founded in the structures immanent in persons and communities of persons. This would imply practices which transcend appraisal and assessment of performance to heights of contemplation and implementation of meaning in every task. Instead of beginning with a deficit of “what’s in it for me?” practices can begin with the surplus “how can I help you?” Proposed are practices which impound wisdom-based attributes of compassion, active listening, alterity, mercy, companionate and agapic love in decision analyses, interpretations of results, and incentives. The objective of the humanistically managed organization under the aegis of an anthropology of gift would be to minimize the maximum grief for the the most vulnerable. The objective would be applied as a policy across all authorities delegated by jurisdictions over organizations, and by boards, oversight groups, over decisions within organizations. This view from an anthropology of gift is consonant with emerging definitions of organizations as healing spaces where a balance of solidarity and subsidiarity guide decisions as opposed to simplistically applying supply and demand trade-offs. (shrink)

Cultural and historical variability is completely overwhelming and within its context it is almostimpossible to decipher something “essential”, some “invariant variable” which would comprise a clueto what the human is, – this idea is presented as the main presupposition of Eugen Fink’s philosophicalanthropology. A major direction of Fink’s works is a fundamental critique of traditional ontology anda search for a worldly thinking that would be more appropriate or implicit in human “worldly” existence.While following Husserl’s transcendental philosophy, Fink opened up a (...) new philosophical domainthat is implicit in transcendental mode of awareness. His effort consisted in “revealing” what is alreadyamidst us, what we have silently guessed and lived but dared not speak. This “revelation” is at thebasis of Fink’s conception of education. Education is a movement from authority to autonomy, fromsubmission to “pregiven” and ready-made answers toward the creative, the free activity which is itsown source.Keywords: being human, temporality, freedom, productivity, creativity, political self-understanding. (shrink)

The author distinguishes three main interpretations of the concept, as well as the developmental trends in philosophical anthropology, and reflects on their relationship with critical social philosophy. Consequently, he follows up with an explication of the main assumptions of Arnold Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology and seeks to find out how they influenced the categorical particularity of his critique of postmodern society, labeled as “the crisis of institutions.” The author provides more detailed reflection in references to Gehlen’s Die (...) Seele im technischen Zeitalter, and its analysis of the so-called new subjectivism. The article ends with a critical conclusion, in which the author makes note of certain ideological incongruities in Gehlen’s philosophical standpoint. (shrink)

Martin (Mordechai) Buber was born in Vienna in 1878. He lived in Germany until 1933, then emigrated to Switzerland, and later to Palestine. After the Second World War, the philosopher condemned Arab-Jewish hostility and inhumane actions towards Palestinian Arabs. Buber died in 1965 in Jerusalem. The creative legacy of the philosopher is extremely popular in many countries. As a thinker, Buber combined many diverse interests and aspirations. He was a non-trivial sage-philosopher, a brilliant translator of the Tanakh, a researcher of (...) Hasidism, an outstanding educator and preacher, poet and writer. Buber's views are close to dialectical theology and existentialism. The central idea of Buber's philosophy is being as a dialogue between God and man, man and the world. Developing the concept of religious existentialism, the thinker significantly enriched philosophical anthropology. The insight expressed by him, rooted in the biblical tradition, is simple and majestic: a person's life is in dialogue with other people who are like him. This dialogue is creative and saving when it is carried out through the medium of God, his precepts about morality and love. It is in this dialogue that the vitality of God himself is revealed. Thus, Buber responded with all his creativity to the philosophical ideas of the XX century, to the ideas of "the death of God" and "the death of Man". (shrink)

Martin Heidegger often and emphatically claimed that his work, especially in his masterpiece Being and Time, was not philosophical anthropology. He conceived of his project as ‘fundamental ontology’, and argued that because it is singularly concerned with the question of the meaning of Being in general (and not ‘human being’), this precluded him from being engaged in philosophical anthropology. This is a claim we should find puzzling because at the very heart of Heidegger’s project is an (...) analysis of the structures of the existence of ‘Dasein’, an entity that human beings are an instantiation of, the entity that has a relationship of concern towards its existence and which is capable of raising the question of the meaning of Being. Heidegger argues that because he only analyses human beings insofar as they are Daseins, he cannot be doing philosophical anthropology, but only fundamental ontology. In this paper, I refute this claim. I provide a sketch of philosophical anthropology which conceives it as the other side of anthropology’s coin. Where anthropology is concerned with understanding human difference, philosophical anthropology attempts to understand what is common to all instances of human existence and elucidate its significant features and structures. Whether he likes it or not, Heidegger is engaged in exactly this kind of project because anything that applies truly to Dasein applies truly to human beings. With this in mind, I examine Heidegger’s analysis of moods to demonstrate that Heidegger’s work is best understood as involving a kind of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

This book explores the question of what it means to be a human being through sustained and original analyses of three important philosophical topics: relativism, skepticism, and naturalism in the social sciences. Kevin Cahill's approach involves an original employment of historical and ethnographic material that is both conceptual and empirical in order to address relevant philosophical issues. Specifically, while Cahill avoids interpretative debates, he develops an approach to philosophical critique based on Cora Diamond's and James Conant's work (...) on the early Wittgenstein. This makes possible the use of a concept of culture that avoids the dogmatism that not only typifies traditional metaphysics but also frequently mars arguments from ordinary language or phenomenology. This is especially crucial for the third part of the book, which involves a cultural-historical critique of the ontology of the self in Stanley Cavell's work on skepticism. In pursuing this strategy, the book also mounts a novel and timely defense of the interpretivist tradition in the philosophy of the social sciences. Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture will be of interest to researchers working on the philosophy of the social sciences, Wittgenstein, and philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

The current stage of the development of amateur stayer running practices can be characterized as personality-building, since the main goals of runners (especially marathon runners and super marathon runners) are not so much related to strengthening health, as to the sphere of personal improvement and self-knowledge: the development of will, character, testing yourself in an extreme situation, testing previously inaccessible emotions and states of consciousness. The object of the study is ego texts (books for a wide audience, including the online (...) "samizdat") of modern Russian running enthusiasts. The method of studying these texts is the biographical method, which makes it possible to determine the multidimensional influence of running activity on fundamental changes in personality development and the formation of her life path. The analyzed biographies inherit both the confessional tradition of Augustine (the contrast of the aimless and vicious "pre-race" life, as well as the traumatic experience of running neophyte and significant achievements in many areas of personal development after the adoption of the values expressed through running Coubertin's "religio athleticae"), and the adventurous and heroic biographical tradition noted by M. M. Bakhtin, inherent in the Renaissance, as well as romanticism and Nietzscheanism with their focus on the formation (in our case, through a stayer run) of a new (or "super-") person. The qualitative result of running activity is the achievement by the subject of a new stage of development – a person running (homo currens), which is characterized by activity, mobility, heroism, asceticism, striving for maximum self-realization, achieving harmony of body and spirit. Homo currens opposes both virtual pastime and the fetishization of comfort culture, suggesting, referring to the concept of Viktor Frankl, filling life with new meanings and values through overcoming the inevitable suffering for a stayer run. Amateur running is considered by writers as a publicly available and effective means of gaining physical, mental and social well-being, which expresses its humanistic essence and gives philosophical and anthropological significance to the works under study. (shrink)

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat’s philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

We can see personhood as a philosophical and historical struggle between positive and negative forms of ‘being at one’, a struggle most succinctly described by Hölderlin, a central figure in Romanticism and in German idealism through his close friendship and collaboration with Schelling and Hegel. For Hölderlin, ‘Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania / Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way’. This paper is an exploration (...) of a range of forms of aloneness, linked by the family resemblance of a number of such ‘solitude’ terms (loneliness, solitude, solitary, aloneness, lonesome, individual, atonement) to the idea of ‘oneness’. ‘Being at one’ was distinctively articulated in the Romantic period, in philosophy as well as in the arts. Based on this distinctiveness, this article presents an historical account of the developing philosophical anthropology of being at one, dividing the development of ‘being at one’ between the pre-Romantic, Romantic, and post-Romantic eras. (shrink)

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)

Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century is the first book of its kind that offers a systematic overview of an often misrepresented period in Russia's philosophy. Focusing on philosophical ideas produced during the late 1950s – early 1990s, it reconstructs the development of genuine philosophical thought in the Soviet period and introduces those non-dogmatic Russian thinkers who saw in philosophy a means of reforming social and intellectual life. Covering such areas of (...) philosophical inquiry as philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, the history of philosophy, activity approach as well as communication and dialogue studies, the volume presents and thoroughly discusses central topics and concepts developed by Soviet thinkers in that particular fields. Written by a team of internationally recognized scholars from Russia and abroad, it examines the work of well-known Soviet philosophers (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Evald Ilyenkov and Merab Mamardashvili) as well as those important figures (such as Vladimir Bibler, Alexander Zinoviev, Yury Lotman, Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Genrich Batishchev, Sergey Rubinstein, and others) who have often been overlooked. By introducing and examining original philosophical ideas that evolved in the Soviet period, the book confirms that not all Soviet philosophy was dogmatic and tied to orthodox Marxism and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. It shows Russian philosophical development of the Soviet period in a new light, as a philosophy defined by a genuine discourse of exploration and intellectual progress, rather than stagnation and dogmatism. In addition to providing the historical and cultural background that explains the development of the 20th-century Russian philosophy, the book also puts the discussed ideas and theories in the context of contemporary philosophical discussions showing their relevance to nowadays debates in Western philosophy. With short biographies of key thinkers, an extensive current bibliography and a detailed chronology of Soviet philosophy, this research resource provides a new understanding of the Soviet period and its intellectual legacy 100 years after the Russian Revolution. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that philosophical anthropology is central to ethics and politics. The denial of this has facilitated the triumph of debased notions of humans developed by Hobbes which has facilitated the enslavement of people to the logic of the global market, a logic which is now destroying the ecological conditions for civilization and most life on Earth. Reviving the classical understanding of the central place of philosophical anthropology to ethics and politics, the (...) early work of Hegel and Marx is explicated, defended and further developed by interpreting this through developments in post-mechanistic science. Overcoming the opposition between the sciences and the humanities, it is suggested that the conception of humans developed in this way can orient people in their struggle for the liberty to avert a global ecological catastrophe. (shrink)

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat's philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

The lack of consensus in American society regarding the permissibility of assisted suicide and euthanasia is due in large part to a failure to address the nature of the human person involved in the ethical act itself. For Karol Wojtyla, philosopher and Pope, ethical action finds meaning only in an authentic understanding of the person; but it is through acting ( actus humanus ) alone that the human person reveals himself. Knowing what the person ought to be cannot be divorced (...) from what he ought to do; forWojtyla, the structure of the ethical “do” – the act itself – comes first. The current paper will focus on four arguments used to justify assisted suicide and euthanasia: (1) the argument from autonomy, (2) the argument from compassion, (3) the argument from the evil of suffering, and (4) the argument from the loss of dignity. It will seek to answer each claim from the perspective of Karol Wojtyla's philosophical anthropology. Much of this will come from his defining work in pure philosophy, The Acting Person (1969). The final part of the paper will suggest some positive solutions to the stalemate over the euthanasia debate, again drawn from Wojtyla's idea of human fulfillment through participation with the other, and with the community itself. (shrink)

Interconnections between philosophic anthropology, conceptions of globalization and sustainable development are investigated. Found out that biological, social, intellectual and spiritual parameters of human being determine specific directions and spheres of globalization. Discovering of these interconnectionsallows to make clear necessary measures of transition to sustainable development. Substantiated that such researches serve as a basis for working out of political, economic, social, intellectual and spiritual guidelines of ensuring of reliable international communication’s security, survival of mankind and solution of internal problems of (...) every country. Investigations of interconnections between philosophic anthropology, conceptions of globalization and sustainable development could became as a mainstream of development of philosophy in XXI century. (shrink)

This article argues against a leading cognitivist and moral interpretation of shame that is present in the philosophical literature. That standard view holds that shame is the felt-response to a loss of self-esteem, which is the result of negative self-assessment. I hold that shame is a heteronomous and primitive bodily affect that is perceptual rather than judgmental in nature. Shame results from the breakdown and thwarting of our desire for anonymous, unexceptional, and disattentive co-existence with others. I use the (...) sociological theory of Erving Goffman and the theory of shame found in philosophical anthropology to support this view. I also use the cases of shame and chronic shame that often accompany disability to show that shame is separable from negative self-assessment and, instead, emerges as an affective response to a world (of equipment, things, and people) that disallows unburdened and unreflective interpersonal equilibrium. (shrink)

The paper is a critical analysis of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of work as it is formulated in a number of essays from the 1950s and 60s. It begins with a reconstruction of the central theses advanced in ‘Travail et parole’ (1953) and related texts, where Ricoeur sought to outline a philosophical anthropology in which work is given its due. To give work its due, from an anthropological standpoint, is to see it as limited by counter-concept of language, according (...) to Ricoeur. The paper then argues that this way of understanding the anthropological significance of work is not only internally problematic, but at odds with phenomenological insights to be found elsewhere in Ricoeur’s oeuvre, particularly Le Volontaire et l’involontaire (1950). The final section of the paper makes some suggestions for how the phenomenological and anthropological poles of a philosophy of work might be better integrated, and the ‘nexus between speech and work’ better described. (shrink)

This article concerns the way of philosophizing by Karol Wojtyła; a special emphasis is put on the relation between philosophical anthropology and ethics in his thought. The Polish thinker was active in both of them and it seems initially that ethics was his main area of expertise. However, a close examination of select works of Wojtyła confirms that philosophical anthropology was his main field. He was interested in how the person is revealed in his acts, including (...) moral acts. Thus, the person as such remains at the center of attention and reflection of the thinker and his involvement in ethics was to demonstrate how that person matures on the dynamic level. Karol Wojtyła is pre-eminently a philosopher of the human person. (shrink)

According to Hume, humans, unlike other group-living animals, cannot accommodate their natural sexual appetite naturally; this is a Rawlsian 'circumstance of justice'. Humans have to formulate conventions or artifices to govern their reproductive relations in order to maintain their group or social life. Hume implicitly addresses this issue in his discussion of chastity. The paper explicates his argument. This argument, and its underlying philosophical anthropology, is seen to embody a distinctive approach to a striking feature of the human (...) condition -- sexual relations are universal but not uniform. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the philosophical-ethical foundations of Constantine’s definition of philosophy, as well as its anthropological and axiological aspects. The focus is placed on the relationship between definitions of philosophy postulated by Constantine the Philosopher and John of Damascus, the latter of which traces the six classical definitions systematized by Platonic commentators. Byzantine thinkers proposed a method of unifying both the theoretical and practical aspects of ancient philosophy with a Christian way of life by interpreting the classical definitions (...) of philosophy and dividing it into theoretical and practical parts, the latter including ethics. Constantine understood philosophy in the sense of the second (knowledge of things Divine and human) and the fourth (becoming like God) meanings of earlier definitions, with the addition of the Christian sense of acting in accordance with the image of God. In addition to these gnosiological and anthropological aspects, the paper also observes the axiological aspect of Constantine’s definition of philosophy, which appears to be a foundation for exploring human behaviour as in compliance with Christian laws encouraging changes in ethical principles so as to follow a new code of ethics, through which new values were presented to the Slavs. (shrink)

In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant attracted attention for his criticisms of colonialism, that problematized the established boundaries between civilization and barbarism, and chastised English colonialism in particular. Some years later, however, in his lectures on Anthropology, he ventured some oddly racist views, concerning the specific differences between European and Indigenous peoples. Kant's racism is by now well‐documented. However, less attention has been paid to the peculiarities of that racism, and especially its foundations in a theory of virtue. (...) His racism comes to light especially in his discussions of the virtues of patience and courage, and in passages which have rarely been subject to critical scrutiny still to this day. This article starts out from an analysis of the functions of Kant's concepts of courage and patience in his account of European versus Indigenous difference, with a view to interrogating the politics of virtue in the present, where this discussion is reoccurring in new guises. What Kant considered courage has now been devalorized, while what he considered patience is now valorized. This reversal of perspectives on what counts as virtuous has occurred in correlation with a reversal in western perspectives on Indigeneity. Such that contemporary accounts of courage are correlated with contemporary accounts of Indigeneity. These reversals of perspective must be understood in context of the transformation which philosophical anthropology has undergone under the duress of the Anthropocene. Contemporary works by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Jonathan Lear are of great relevance to this correlated transformation and will be discussed here. The article analyses what both Chakrabarty and Lear understand by courage today, its relevance to the Anthropocene, and points out the limitations of their theories. Ultimately the article argues for a rethinking of the definition of courage as a political virtue of the Anthropocenic present. (shrink)

With the widespread infusion of online technology there has been an increase in various studies investigating the practices in online communities including also philosophical perspectives. What those debates have in common is that they call for more critical thinking about the theory of online communication. Drawing on Techno-Anthropological research perspectives, our interest is placed on exploring and identifying human interactions and technology in intersectional spaces. This article explores information systems that allow for interchanges of different users. We discuss ontological (...) assumptions that focus on understanding the kind of dialogue that can be captured between different expert groups when they utilize information systems. We present the notion of ‘dialogic’ by Mikhail Bakhtin and contextualize it through an analysis of online dialogue. Dialogic or ‘conversation and inquiry’ is discussed as being mediated through human relationships. Acknowledging the existence of at least two voices the underlying differences between dialogue partners are highlighted. (shrink)

The philosophical roots of Malinowski's functionalism are in the academic circles of Krakow, where three figures seem to have exerted a particularly strong influence: Pawlicki, Straszewski, and Heinrich. The predominant trend in philosophy at that time was empiriocriticism, as developed by Mach and Avenarius. Also important were F. A. Lange's interpretation of Marburg neo-Kantianism. It should be noted that the historical philosophy field was extremely broad and diverse. Functionalism, a philosophically open concept, cannot be subordinated to any one (...) class='Hi'>philosophical system, although the "openness" of functionalism is not absolute but complemented by its "closedness" to certain other philosophies. Praxism pervades functionalist theory and even creates its foundation. Malinowski approach is entirely scientific, but functionalism is never just empirical. Malinowski realized that pure experience is as impossible as pure reasoning. (shrink)

Li Zehou is known as the "intellectual leader of the Chinese Enlightenment" of the 1980s. His major quest has always been for a way to define the role of human agency versus determinism on the one hand, and voluntarism on the other. In the 1980s, Li came forward with a philosophical anthropology (his "theory of subjectivity" or "practice") that moves between two poles: On the one hand, mankind is different from the animals because of its capacity to mold (...) its own environment in a goal-directed way by means of "tools," which means that subjectivity is real if mankind can indeed to a great extent control its own destiny. On the other hand, human control over nature is subject to limitations that are largely determined by the level of technology and social organization in any given society at a certain time. Li attributes the widespread appeal of Maoist voluntarism in China to the persistence of the belief in the transformative power of the human will, unaided by science and technology. (shrink)

This article will address Edith Stein's interests in relation to the microcosm of man, whether as a material, living, animated or spiritual body, as well as in his social, historical, community and cultural position. For Edith Stein, only through this set of interrelated and exclusive instances, each with its own particularities and yet dependent on the others. The phenomenological study of the SELF presented by the author, in the search for the Divine, for awareness of “character”, in the experience of (...) each part of one's own being, in experience, in empathy, where through philosophical anthropology Edith Stein conceives everyone as living beings, with man as a microcosm. For this reason, in the first part it will be discussed regarding The Centrality of the Body in Stein's Philosophical Anthropology. It has become a necessity within anthropology to refer to the body/empathy element. These two realities are established as essential in Stein's considerations and they are what will determine the scope of what refers to the empathic process and the Constitution of the self, elements so necessary for the recovery of the affirming reality of the human in its specification’s man/woman. In the second stage will address about the Soul and Spirit in Stein's Philosophical Anthropology. The living body is established in the fact that in addition to possessing external sensory characteristics, which can be grasped by consciousnesses, they themselves are holders of the ability to feel. Stein postulates as the first characteristic of the experienced body The Binding of the latter to an individual consciousness, to a subject. In his doctoral work, Stein turns to the characterization of an individual who has an essence that is established not only in the corporeal-psychic dimension, but also in that of spiritual appreciation. Finally, and will be closed with conclusions. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The study aims to substantiate philosophical anthropology as a space for the development of biopolitics, which is a relatively new synthetic scientific knowledge of the political in the biological and the biological in the political, which, however, has its roots in the era of antiquity. The analysis of biopolitics in the context of contemporary global challenges, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, is carried out, which allows to actualize a new direction of biopolitics – microbiopolitics. _Theoretical basis._ The (...) study is based on an understanding of the initial, in relation to biopolitics, the nature of philosophical anthropology. While philosophical anthropology seeks an answer to the question – who is _Homo sapiens_, given the biosocial nature of man, biopolitics specifies the question in the form – who is _homo politicus_ in modern socio-political space with a focus on the imperative of a human-centred approach in the social sciences. The study is based on scientific works by specialists in philosophical anthropology and biopolitics. _Originality._ The authors substantiate the expediency and relevance of considering philosophical anthropology as a contextual space for the evolution of biopolitical knowledge from the natural philosophy of Antiquity to modern microbiopolitics. _Conclusions._ Philosophical anthropology is seen as a specific epistemological landscape in which fields of scientific knowledge are formed and developed that are in one way or another involved in the philosophical problems of man: philosophical psychology, social anthropology, philosophy of medicine, humanology, philosophy of education, ethics, as well as biophilosophy, bioethics, and, in particular, biopolitics. (shrink)

The first part of the article discusses the conditions under which the “school” of thought known as “philosophical anthropology” arose and the relevance today of the problems it posed, concluding with a look at the recent prevalence taken by biological research. The second part examines the conceptions advanced by its leading figures, Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, and shows how each of them contributed to a “sociologization of anthropological knowledge.” On the basis of this analysis, (...) class='Hi'>philosophical anthropology proves itself capable of making a significant contribution to an interdisciplinary understanding of the conditions of human life and to reflection on the foundations of sociological research and social theory. (shrink)

Bennett and Hacker criticize a number of neuroscientists and philosophers for attributing capacities which belong to the human being as a whole, like perceiving or deciding, to a “part” of the human being, viz. the brain. They call this type of mistake the “mereological fallacy”. Interestingly, the authors say that these capacities cannot be ascribed to the mind either. They reject not only materialistic monism but also Cartesian dualism, arguing that many predicates describing human life do not refer to physical (...) or mental properties, nor to the sum of such properties. I agree with this important principle and with the critique of the mereological fallacy which it underpins, but I have two objections to the authors’ view. Firstly, I think that the brain is not literally a part of the human being, as suggested. Secondly, Bennett and Hacker do not offer an account of body and mind which explains in a systematic way how the domain of phenomena which transcends the mental and the physical relates to the mental and the physical. I first argue that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology provides the kind of account we need. Then, drawing on Plessner, I present an alternative view of the mereological relationships between brain and human being. My criticism does not undercut Bennett and Hacker’s diagnosis of the mereological fallacy but rather gives it a more solid philosophical–anthropological foundation. (shrink)