Schiller and Philosophical Anthropology

“Philosophical anthropology” is an unusual lemma for a Schiller handbook. In the context of the philosophical terminology in the German language, this term refers to a current of twentieth-century thought emerging from the reflections by Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner and Arnold Gehlen (cf. Fischer 2008). At the time, the term constituted a philosophical attempt to register in a decisive way the impact of the empirical and experimental natural sciences in areas ranging from sensory physiology through to evolutionary theory, and with particular reference to the new biology—and thereby to integrate this advance in the history of knowledge into philosophical reflection. In this context, the question concerning “the human being” was of capital importance, especially as a question regarding the human being’s position in the continuum of natural history in general, and in the continuum of animal evolution specifically.