Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology

Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology

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Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology Nature, Life, and the Human between Transcendental and Empirical Perspectives Edited by Phillip Honenberger Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, US

Selection, introduction and editorial matter Phillip Honenberger 2015 Remaining chapters Contributors 2015 Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-50087-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-56741-6 ISBN 978-1-137-50088-5 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137500885 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors vii viii Introduction 1 Phillip Honenberger 1 In Pursuit of Something Essential about Man: Heidegger and Philosophical Anthropology 27 Beth Cykowski 2 Gehlen, Nietzsche, and the Project of a Philosophical Anthropology 49 Richard Schacht 3 Hans Blumenberg: Philosophical Anthropology and the Ethics of Consolation 66 Vida Pavesich 4 Naturalism, Pluralism, and the Human Place in the Worlds 94 Phillip Honenberger 5 Plessner s Conceptual Investigations of Life : Structural Narratology 121 Scott Davis 6 Gehlen s Philosophical Anthropology: Contemporary Applications in Addiction Research 147 Sally Wasmuth 7 The Hybrid Hominin: A Renewed Point of Departure for Philosophical Anthropology 171 Lenny Moss 8 Intentionality and Mentality as Explanans and as Explanandum : Michael Tomasello s Research Program from the Perspective of Philosophical Anthropology 183 Hans-Peter Krüger 9 Biology and Culture 219 Joseph Margolis v

vi Contents 10 The Mortal Self: Toward a Transcendental-Pragmatic Anthropology 229 Sami Pihlström Index 253

Acknowledgments The editor would like to thank three professional organizations for hosting sessions at which some chapters contained in this volume were first presented: the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), under the titles Philosophical Anthropology I and Philosophical Anthropology II, in Montpellier, France, 2013; and the Society for Humanist Philosophers at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, in Baltimore, MD, 2013, under the session entitled Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology. The APA session was chaired and facilitated by John Shook (thank you John!). The Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine has provided the editor with library support, relief from teaching duties, and a stimulating research environment since 2014, thereby facilitating completion of this project. For the cover image, the editor is indebted to Frances Osugi, who first noticed the relevance of Waterhouse Hawkins famous image to the book s themes, and then, upon request, painstakingly produced a satisfactory transformation of this image. Finally, thanks are due to Palgrave Macmillan and especially Esme Chapman for seamless support and guidance throughout the publication process. vii

Notes on Contributors Beth Cykowski is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. Her dissertation examines Heidegger s engagement with the life sciences and philosophical anthropology, and her wider research interests include the post-kantian continental tradition in philosophy as well as the conceptual history of biology and anthropology. Scott Davis holds an MA in Regional Studies: East Asia and a PhD in Social Anthropology, both from Harvard University. He lives in Jinan, China, where he teaches in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Shandong University. His research mostly involves Bronze Age Chinese thought and culture; he is working on demonstrating the structural relations in textual composition coordinating three of the most sacred books of the classical Chinese tradition: the Yi jing, the Confucian Analects and the Zuo zhuan of the Springs and Autumns historical writings. He is the author of The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology of the Yi jing (2012). Twenty-two years ago, he produced an unofficial, functional translation into English of Helmuth Plessner s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch and has been happy to share a copy of this unofficial translation with interested researchers worldwide. Phillip Honenberger is Program Coordinator and a Fellow-In-Residence at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Philadelphia, PA. He completed a doctorate in Philosophy at Temple University in 2013, writing on the philosophical anthropologies of Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, and G. H. Mead. He holds a BA in Philosophy and Music from the College of William and Mary, 2003. In addition to philosophical anthropology, his research interests include the history and philosophy of science (especially biology and the human sciences). His work has appeared in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science, Metaphilosophy, Journal of the Philosophy of History, and International Philosophical Quarterly. Hans-Peter Krüger is the Chair for Political Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and co-editor of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. His research areas are philosophical anthropologies, classical pragmatisms and neo-pragmatisms, and political and social viii

Notes on Contributors ix philosophies of public communication. He has held fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley (1989), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1990 1991), and the University of Pittsburgh, PA (1992 1993), and has been a guest professor at the Jagiellonen University Kraków, Poland (2002 2003), University of Vienna, Austria (2003), and Ernst Cassirer Professor at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala, Sweden (2005 2006). His recent monographs include (all in German): Philosophical Anthropology as Life Politics. German-Jewish and Pragmatist Critiques of Modernity (2009), Brain, Behaviour, and Time. The Research Framework of Philosophical Anthropology (2010), and Heroism and Labour in the Origin of Hegel s Philosophy (2014). Joseph Margolis is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. His recent publications include four volumes on American philosophy at the end of the twentieth century: Reinventing Pragmatism (2002), The Unraveling of Scientism (2003), Pragmatism s Advantage (2010), and Pragmatism Ascendent (2012). He is also author of The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism (2010) and The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology (2009). Lenny Moss holds a doctorate in both Comparative Biochemistry and Philosophy. He is a former molecular cell biologist and has since been a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and currently at the University of Exeter. He is the author of What Genes Can t Do (2003) and numerous articles in leading journals of social philosophy, philosophy of science, and biology and biomedicine. His work focuses on questions of nature and normativity and draws especially upon traditions of philosophical anthropology, Frankfurt School critical theory and the human and natural sciences. He s been an invited guest lecturer at numerous universities through Europe, North America and Australia. Vida Pavesich holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of California San Diego, 2003. She lives in Oakland, CA, where she is a lecturer at the California State University East Bay and Diablo Valley College. Her research concentrates on philosophical anthropology, in particular the work of Hans Blumenberg. Her articles have appeared in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Thesis 11, Philosophy and Social Criticism and others. She aims to bring philosophical anthropology into dialogue with contemporary philosophical discussions occurring in critical theory, poststructuralism, and the ethics of vulnerability. Recently, she has developed an interest in the use of evolutionary biology and anthropology, as well as cognitive science in articulating a nuanced philosophical anthropology.

x Notes on Contributors Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where he also previously (2009 2015) worked as the Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. In addition, he leads the team focusing on contemporary philosophy of religion within the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence, Reason and Religious Recognition (2014 2019). He has written widely on pragmatism, philosophical anthropology, transcendental philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of religion. His recent books include Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (2013), Taking Evil Seriously (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and the Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism (2015). Richard Schacht is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Emeritus) at the University of Illinois. He has written extensively on Nietzsche and other figures and developments in the post-kantian interpretive tradition. His interests revolve around the general topic of human reality and issues in social, normative and value theory. His books include Nietzsche (1983, in Routledge s Arguments of the Philosophers series), Making Sense of Nietzsche (1995), Hegel and After (1975), Alienation (1970), The Future of Alienation (1994), and Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner s Ring (2004, with Philip Kitcher). He is the editor of Nietzsche: Selections (1993), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (1994), Nietzsche s Postmoralism (2001), and a forthcoming Norton anthology, After Kant: The Interpretive Tradition (2015). Sally Wasmuth is an associated health research fellow at Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center, Indianapolis, and Assistant Professor in the School of Occupational Therapy at University of Indianapolis. Wasmuth received her PhD in Philosophy with a focus on philosophy of biology, neuroscience, and addiction from the University of Exeter, UK, and her Master s in Occupational Therapy from Indiana University, Indianapolis. She is involved in a number of VA-funded studies examining translation and implementation of mental health and addiction research into practice and innovative occupation-based interventions for addiction. Wasmuth s most recent work in the area of addiction-asoccupation has been published in the British and Canadian Journals of Occupational Therapy as well as the Journal of Occupational Science and the American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation.