An Interdisciplinary Conference Bringing Together the
Legacy of a German Philosophical Tradition with Theoretical and
Empirical Work from Leading Investigators in the Human Sciences

May 6-9, 2005
University of Notre Dame
Center for Continuing Education

Description of Conference

Before the calving off of the human sciences from philosophy Immanuel Kant suggested that the first three principal questions of philosophy, “What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?”, and “What may I hope for?” could be “reckoned under anthropology” because they all refer to a fourth question “What is man?” Despite its self-evident importance, and despite its august formulation by Kant, philosophical anthropology has known only a checkered, and some might even say star-crossed, career. Especially in the Anglo-American world, and not for any lack of importance that concepts of human nature have played in determining the fates of multitudes, the definition and characterization of human beings has come to be assumed as either irrelevant to philosophical pursuit or merely the task of empirical scientific description. Where it has been the perennial intent of philosophical anthropology (most notably in early 20th century Germany) to bridge the chasm between the natural and the socio-cultural sciences, it is precisely these that have come to fall farther apart, even to the point of occasionally erupting into factional warfare. At a time when our ethical pre-understandings of what it is to be human are being burdened with the challenges of biotechnology on the one hand and with the competing claims of local identity versus economic globalization and modernization on the other, a renewal of philosophical anthropology as a mediating force that can draw synthetically and critically on the wealth of new empirical studies should be seen as not only salutary but overdue. It is the intent of the proposed conference to contribute to just such an effort and Notre Dame, for a variety of reasons, provides a well-suited venue to do so.

It may come as a surprise to some that in the face of a steady stream of highly publicized formulations about human nature coming from the direction of evolutionary theory that any manner of cross-disciplinary syntheses about the nature of humans could be seen as wanting. The rift, however, between the socio-cultural disciplines that have long since eschewed biology in the name of anti-essentialism and anti-racialism and the new socio-biologists cum evolutionary psychologists who have castigated the former as being the defenders of the “blank slate”, can be annealed neither through victory of one side over the other nor through a contrived marriage lacking common ground. A more capacious framework must be found for bringing the bounty of new biological and socio-cultural findings together and it is here where the legacy of philosophical anthropology may be of value. Absent the benefits of a rich literature concerned with the place of humans in nature, contemporary neo-Darwinians have attempted to derive too much from a single principle. Where some processes of variation and differential reproduction (the central tenets of Darwinism) are relatively uncontroversial, the attempt to extrapolate and generalize this process of change into a fundamental ontology of all of life, including human life, is another matter. The postulation of competing genes or “replicators” as the fundaments of life, followed by the postulation of “memes”, cognitive modules, and reproductive-fitness maximizing males and females as higher order extrapolations of same, is nothing other than an attempt to construe and theorize all of life on the basis of a single insight. Where such contemporary neo-Darwinians have attempted to rethink the biology/culture divide along the site-line of one axis, that of evolutionary selection, they have neglected to consider several others axes. The possibility of something like evolution by natural selection presupposes a living, developing, adapting organism, it doesn’t define it, let alone exhaust its characterization. Philosophical Anthropology from its inception sought, in the words of Arnold Gehlen “to view man’s intelligence in the context of his biological nature, the structure of his perception, action and needs, that is, to view the overall determination of his powers of thought within the total complex of his senses and drives.” What nearly 200 years of anthropological reflection revealed was that the differentia of humans was not just that of one or a few new adaptations but rather was rooted in a kind of underdevelopment—a full-bodied lack of integration into a particular environmental context—thus a kind of organismic “detachment” that simultaneously entailed the possibility of greater “world-openness.” As compensation for the lack of “instinctual” determination, culture arises as a “natural event” within the realm of nature – the nature-culture transformation is located within nature itself and it comes not merely as a fortuitous prerogative other species lack but as an unavoidable necessity of survival, with social and normative presuppositions and implications which while not amenable to assimilation into the impoverished language of gene-speak, have and may yet again call out for articulation within an empirically informed, socio-culturally, and phenomenologically, reflective discourse.

Quite independent (and innocent) of this philosophical legacy that peaked before World War II and failed to make significant inroads this side of the Atlantic, several current lines of research in biology and the human sciences have come to point in broadly conciliatory directions. With the role of changes in developmental timing as a source of evolutionary innovation gaining increasing recognition evidence and argument for the thesis of human underdetermination and underspecialization, through evolutionary fetalization, is gaining new prominence. Correlatively, both morphological and molecular evidence with respect to developmental plasticity is tantamount to constituting an evolutionary arrow of world-openness. Multiple lines of evidence, from anthropology as well as the cognitive sciences, have come to point toward both the centrality of the capacity for social cooperation, through natural detachment, juvinalization and the expansion of the emotional repertoire, as the sine qua non of early hominid survival and toward the role of the body, i.e., it’s “perception, action and needs” as constituting the preconditions for self-image, nascent communication and “autocuable” memory by way of a preverbal language of mimetic gesture. A half century beyond its philosophical heyday as it may be, the intentions of philosophical anthropology are now and finally greeted with the makings of a robust empirical foundation.