Philosophical Anthropology

What it asks

Biology describes the organism. Psychology describes the mind. Sociology describes the society. None of them is asking what a human being IS.

Philosophical anthropology asks that directly, and the most productive answers have started from a comparison. Compared with other animals, humans are strikingly unspecialised - no claws, no speed, no season, no fixed environment, an absurdly long infancy. The proposal that follows is that culture, institutions and technology are not additions to human nature but compensations for the lack of one.

That is an appealing answer and it has a problem, which is that it makes human nature into the absence of a nature.

The recurring problems

Whether there is a human nature. If there is, it constrains what social arrangements can work. If there is not, then appeals to it in ethics and politics are empty - and such appeals are everywhere.

The circularity. Any account of what humans essentially are is produced by humans in a particular time, and tends to describe that time's ideal. The history of the field is full of universal accounts of humanity that turn out to describe a European man of the author's class.

Self-relation. Humans stand in a relation to themselves that other animals seem not to - can take a position on their own lives, and can fail at being what they are. Plessner called this eccentric positionality, and it is the field's most distinctive contribution.

Whether the question survived its critics. Structuralism and Foucault argued that the human as an object of knowledge is a recent invention that would pass. Restating the question after that is the field's ongoing problem.

How it developed

Kant's question - what is the human being? - to which he said the others reduce, sets the agenda.

Marx's account of species-being made human nature social and historical: what we essentially are is beings who produce, and alienation is the condition of being cut off from that.

The field proper formed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Scheler placed the human in a hierarchy of living beings; Plessner analysed the peculiar self-distance of human existence; Gehlen argued that being biologically underequipped forces the creation of institutions.

Then it was attacked from two directions. Heidegger held that asking what humans are as a kind of object misses how existence is disclosed. The structuralists and Foucault argued that the human was an artefact of a particular arrangement of knowledge and would disappear with it.

The field survived more strongly outside Europe than in it, and has recently been rebuilt through engagement with evolutionary anthropology and with traditions that never separated the question from ethics - Confucian accounts of the person as constituted by relationships, and African accounts on which a person becomes one through community.

The positions within it

Essentialism and anti-essentialism about human nature; historicism; naturalism, which takes the question to be answerable by biology; existentialism, which holds that existence precedes essence. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The question is now mostly asked under other names - in cognitive science, in evolutionary anthropology, in bioethics - and it becomes explicit when the boundary is at stake.

Enhancement, artificial minds and animal cognition each force it. Every argument that something would make us less human, or that some capacity is distinctively human, is doing philosophical anthropology, usually without the practitioner noticing that the claim needs defending.