ARTICLES
Inquiry Without Names in
Plato's Cratylus Christine
Thomas [abstract]
An Intensional Interpretation of Ockham’s
Theory of Supposition Catarina
Dutilh Novaes[abstract] The Young Marx and
German Idealism: Revisiting the Doctoral Dissertation Martin
McIvor[abstract] Hans Blumenberg’s
Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer Vida
Pavesich[abstract] In this paper, I situate Hans Blumenberg
historically and conceptually in relation to a subtheme in the famous
debate between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos,
Switzerland in 1929. The subtheme concerns Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s
divergent attitudes toward philosophical anthropology as it relates to
the starting points and goals of philosophy. I then reconstruct
Blumenberg’s anthropology, which involves reconceptualizing Cassirer’s
philosophy of symbolic forms in relation to Heidegger’s objections to
the philosophical anthropology of his day (e.g., Max Scheler, Helmuth
Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen) as unduly anthropocentric. Blumenberg
builds on anthropologist Gehlen’s assumption that human beings are
biologically underdetermined and therefore world-open. With this
starting point, symbolic forms, such as myth and language, make up a
compensatory life-world that supports human existence. Action, or
self-assertion, which is necessary given the lack of a seamless fit
between human beings and the environment, is thus circumscribed and
shaped by the historied, cultural constructs that constitute a
life-world. Human beings can thus be characterized as a species that
continually renegotiates the shape of its existence through its
relation to biological limits on the one hand and cultural constants on
the other. Because Blumenberg and philosophical anthropology are
relatively unexplored by Anglophone philosophers, and because
philosophical anthropology is central to Blumenberg’s methodology
generally, this study provides an introduction to both. Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on
Twentieth Century French Philosophy Alan
Schrift[abstract]
