The Return of Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract

In this paper, I defend the thesis that it was Kant who first proposed philosophical anthropology as the prima philosophia, into which the theorethical question of knowledge, the practical question of moral and political action, as well as the religious question of future life converge. I show how this proposal was not realized by Kant himself, but had to wait until Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen addressed the question between 1928–1940. I explain how later the philosophical anthropology entered into a period of decline, and finally I point out the current return of a renewed philosophical anthropology in contemporary German philosophy, but always as prima philosophia, specially in the latest works of Ernst Tugendhat.