Hans Blumenberg's Philosophical Anthropology

After Heidegger and Cassirer

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8114652
AutoresVida Pavesich (autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen46
Número3
Páginas421-448
Fecha de publicación2008-07-01
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of the history of philosophy (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-5053 • E-ISSN: 1538-4586
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/hph.0.0031
OpenAlexW1996773583
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12
Referencias citadas6

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

Assertion · Epistemology · Mythology · Philosophical anthropology · Relation (database · Theology · Humanities and Social Sciences · Philosophy and Historical Thought · Psychoanalysis and Social Critique · Philosophy