Generative Anthropology

The dominant postmodern intellectual movement of deconstruction was premised on the notion that the rationality of anthropology and the social sciences was spurious, grounded in unexamined metaphysical postulates that had to be “deconstructed.” But René Girard taught us that although we should reject the metaphysical perspective that cannot comprehend the historical essence of the human because it has no place for a scene of origin, we must not renounce the task of explaining the human in rational terms. Girard’s fundamental idea that religion itself is our originary anthropology is central to generative anthropology, even if Girard himself declined to elaborate a theory of the logos, which the fourth Gospel puts “in the beginning,” as an anthropological phenomenon, that is, as the product of a human scene. For generative anthropology, the origin of the human is simultaneously the origin of formal and institutional representation, language and religion, and the central task of anthropology is to understand the consequences of this originary unity.

Deconstruction (building) · Epistemology · Generative grammar · Linguistics · Logos Bible Software · Metaphysics · Philosophical anthropology · Postmodernism · Rationality · Sociology · Theology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Philosophy