0.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Although it is often assumed that any inquiry into the human inevitably leads to pernicious forms of anthropocentrism, current debates about the Anthropocene suggest that we avoid such reflection at our own peril. Drawing on philosophy, biology, and sociology, Helmuth Plessner's Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (1928) offers a powerful account of humans' "excentric positionality," whose key ideas Plessner would further flesh out in his Political Anthropology (1931). Plessner's 1928 book was overshadowed, however, by the near-simultaneous appearance of Being and Time and Heidegger's imperious dismissals of philosophical anthropology. Disturbed by Heidegger's blindspot and its political consequences, during the World War II Hans Jonas, one of Heidegger's most original students, began to outline a conception of organic life as “an experiment with mounting stakes,” with the highest stakes reached in human freedom. That conception, fully elaborated in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966), would serve as the basis for Jonas's influential theory of bioethical and ecological responsibility. Now that Plessner's key works are finally available in English translation, a joint examination of his, Heidegger's, and Jonas's conceptions is in order. We will ask what these three thinkers have to tell us about our current situation.