Plato identified the human
essence with the
soul, affirming that the material body is its prison from which the soul yearns for to be liberated because it wants to see, know and contemplate the pure
hyperuranic ideas. According to the
Phaedrus, after death, souls
transmigrate from a body to another. Therefore Plato introduced an irreducible
mind–body dualism.
Aristotle defined man as a living
substance that is the union of body and soul, in a relationship where the body is matter and soul is immanent form within the so called theory of
hylomorphism. Man is a type of animal with a specific characteristic that makes him superior to other animals: rationality. The soul is not something of extraneous to the body, but it is the principle that organizes, structures, gives life and
form to the body's matter. The Aristotelian soul's conception is described in the treaty
On the Soul from a theoretical point of view, and in the
Politics and
Nicomachean Ethics from a practical one. although it is not clear if he had any influence on
Max Scheler, the founder of philosophical anthropology as an independent discipline, nor on any of the major philosophers that followed him. Augustine has been cited by
Husserl and
Heidegger as one of the early writers to inquire on time-consciousness and the role of
seeing in the feeling of "
Being-in-the-world". Augustine saw the human being as a perfect unity of two substances: soul and body. He was much closer in this anthropological view to
Aristotle than to
Plato. In his late treatise
On Care to Be Had for the Dead sec. 5 (420 AD) he insisted that the body is essential part of the human person: Augustine's favourite figure to describe
body-soul unity is marriage:
caro tua, coniux tua – your body is your wife. Initially, the two elements were in perfect harmony. After the
fall of humanity they are now experiencing dramatic combat between one another. They are two categorically different things: the body is a three-dimensional object composed of the four elements, whereas the soul has no spatial dimensions. Soul is a kind of substance, participating in reason, fit for ruling the body. To be a human is to be a composite of soul and body, and that the soul is superior to the body. The latter statement is grounded in his
hierarchical classification of things into those that merely exist, those that exist and live, and those that exist, live, and have intelligence or reason. According to N. Blasquez, Augustine's dualism of substances of the body and soul doesn't stop him from seeing the unity of body and soul as a substance itself. Following Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, he defined man as a
rational mortal animal –
animal rationale mortale. Augustine also believed in the otherworldly Life of the soul and in the final
resurrection of the flesh.
Modern period Philosophical anthropology as a kind of thought, before it was founded as a distinct philosophical discipline in the 1920s, emerged as post-
medieval thought striving for emancipation from
Christian religion and Aristotelic tradition. The origin of this liberation, characteristic of
modernity, has been the
Cartesian skepticism formulated by
Descartes in the first two of his
Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a notable early lecturer on the subject of anthropology in the European academic world and contributor to its development as a separate discipline, breaking with the German philosophical tradition of what was up to that point referred to as "anthropology" as a subject (although he was not, contrary to some accounts, the first to offer a class the title of "anthropology"). Kant lectured on anthropology for more than 20 years at the University of Königsberg, starting in the winter semester of 1772-73. He specifically developed a conception of
pragmatic anthropology, according to which the human being is studied as a free agent. At the same time, he conceived of his anthropology as an empirical, not a strictly philosophical discipline. Both his philosophical and his anthropological work has been one of the influences in the field during the 19th and 20th century. During the 19th century, an important contribution came from
post-Kantian German idealists like
Fichte,
Schelling and
Hegel,
Philosophical anthropology as independent discipline Since its development in the 1920s, in the milieu of Germany
Weimar culture, philosophical anthropology has been turned into a philosophical discipline, competing with the other traditional sub-disciplines of philosophy such as
epistemology,
ethics,
metaphysics,
logic, and
aesthetics. It is the attempt to unify disparate ways of understanding behaviour of humans as both creatures of their
social environments and creators of their own
values. Although the majority of philosophers throughout the
history of philosophy can be said to have a distinctive "
anthropology" that undergirds their thought, philosophical anthropology itself, as a
specific discipline in philosophy, arose within the later modern period as an outgrowth from developing methods in philosophy, such as phenomenology and
existentialism. The former, which draws its energy from methodical reflection on human experience (first person perspective) as from the philosopher's own personal experience, naturally aided the emergence of philosophical explorations of human nature and the
human condition.
1920s Germany Max Scheler, from 1900 until 1920 had been a follower of
Husserl's phenomenology, the hegemonic form of philosophy in Germany at the time. Scheler sought to apply Husserl's phenomenological approach to different topics. From 1920 Scheler laid the foundation for philosophical anthropology as a philosophical discipline, competing with phenomenology and other philosophic disciplines. Husserl and
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), were the two most authoritative philosophers in Germany at the time, and their criticism of philosophical anthropology and Scheler have had a major impact on the discipline. Scheler defined the human being not so much as a "
rational animal" (as has traditionally been the case since
Aristotle) but essentially as a "loving being". He breaks down the traditional
hylomorphic conception of the human person, and describes the personal being with a
tripartite structure of
lived body,
soul, and spirit.
Love and
hatred are not
psychological emotions, but
spiritual,
intentional acts of the person, which he
categorises as "intentional feelings." Scheler based his philosophical anthropology in a Christian metaphysics of the spirit.
Helmuth Plessner would later emancipate philosophical anthropology from Christianity. Particularly influential has been Cassirer's description of man as a
symbolic animal, Some authors have argued that Wojtyla influenced philosophical anthropology. In the 20th century, other important contributors and influences to philosophical anthropology were
Joseph Maréchal (1878–1944),
Paul Häberlin (1878–1960),
Martin Buber (1878–1965),
E.R. Dodds (1893–1979),
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002),
Eric Voegelin (1901–85),
Hans Jonas (1903–93),
Josef Pieper (1904–97), Hans-Eduard Hengstenberg (1904–1998),
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80),
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61),
Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005),
Emerich Coreth (1919–2006),
Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996),
René Girard (1923–2015),
Leonardo Polo (1926–2013),
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025),
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002),
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and
P. M. S. Hacker (1939- ). ==Anthropology of interpersonal relationships==