PHILOSPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1.0
Figures:
- Aristotle (classical account, animale rationale)
- Derrida (post-modern critique of classical pre-event metaphysics)
Key questions: what is the human being & what is humanity?
- different understandings throughout the history of thought
- change in our understanding of the world → change in our understanding of ourselves
- ‘human’ is a history-dependent concept
- the human is tied to metaphysics (i.e. the very grounding of thought)
- in times of crisis new definitions emerge
Task: see humanity through the perspective of philosophy & metaphysics (over time)
- be wholistic (history, metaphysics, nature, animality must also be understood in relation to humanity)
Cosmology: defines the relationships between everything that is
- i.e. between all the beings (man/animal; man/technology)
ARISTOTLE: animale rationale [animal + reason]
- since then: man is animale XXX [animal + something]
- for him, every definition is genus (animal) + differentia (rational)
Aristotle’s epistemological framework (that he uses to define man):
- genus > species (no species under a given species, but many possible genus-es above it)
- species is also ‘essence’ (i.e. that with the essential properties [PROPORIUM])
- properties make different species recognizable
Accepting a human as [animal + reason] or [animal + something] implies an acceptance of this epistemological framework
- we still often think like this (humans as a special, different animal)
- the ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE is that property which makes us unique (our differentia)
The Animal:
- the Other we must tackle if we accept the Aristotelian framework
- needs to be defined as that which we are not
Section 1: what is the self, understood through the animal
ARISTOTLE (again):
- the soul having multiple dimensions
- human soul / animal soul
Species terms are abstract universals depending on historicity, which may ignore individuals (an assemblage of predicate-flows, folds, enfoldings, overlapping events)
- if all people are ‘men’ there must be some man-essence (permanent core present in all of us, which is not in flux)
- speaking of ‘man’ carries metaphysics suppositions
- if man is a universal, then so is animal
DERRIDA (against classic account):
- there is no single indivisible man/animal limit
- for him we create a singular category as our Other, when this category could not be more varied (whales, ants, dogs…)
- new ‘human’ category → maybe new ‘animal’ category accounting for plurality
Search for new post-humanist definition of ‘man’
- Heidegger, Neitszche (anti-humanist, post-humanist)
- modernity allows us a given malleability of the human being
- PA consideres these views valid
Anthropology:
- science, late 18th century, Ethnology
- biology-based investigation of what it is to be human
- with philosophy mixed in → more speculative, less empirical