0.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Fifty years ago Michel Foucault advanced the influential argument that modern thought foundered on the circular undertaking to ground the possibility of human knowledge in actual knowledge of the human being. We survey various conceptions of the human developed in German modernity with a view to Foucault's diagnosis. Against the background of pre-modern and early modern conceptions of the human, we focus on the tradition of anthropological thinking inaugurated by Herder, including spin-offs of German idealism in the writings of the later Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Marx. We consider the rivalry between twentieth-century philosophical anthropology (Plessner) and Heideggerian fundamental ontology, Hans Jonas' phenomenology of the human, as well as recent disputes regarding the significance of the human standpoint.