Anthropology's Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century - Grand Format

Anthropology's Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century is the first book in English to present and discuss key aspects of the two-hundred-year German tradition of philosophical anthropology. Conceived as a study of the "whole, concrete man" (Heinrich Weber, 1810), anthropology appears during the last decades of the eighteenth century in the often practically oriented writings of men such as Ernst Platner, Karl Wezel, and Johann Herder, and it is then taken up in the twentieth century by thinkers including Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, and Hans Blumenberg.
Anthropology's Interrogation of Philosophy introduces English readers to main aspects of the anthropological tradition in German thought and analyzes, in an unprecedented manner, the connections between the philosophical debates associated with anthropology at the end of the eighteenth century and ongoing philosophical issues in the twentieth century. In particular Jerome Carroll argues that late eighteenth-century anthropology diverges pointedly from traditional, "foundational" approaches to philosophy, for instance, rejecting philosophy's quest for absolute foundations for knowledge or a priori categories and turning to a more contextualized, descriptive account of man's "being in the world." By drawing on the epistemological, ontological, and methodological aspects and implications of anthropological holism, this book reads the philosophical significance of classical twentieth-century anthropology through the lens of eighteenth-century writings on anthropology.