The term 'philosophical anthropology' (in contrast to the empirical sciences of 'physical' and 'cultural' anthropology) was used by Scheler to describe his enterprise at a time when his allegiance to phenomenology was waning. The new discipline is given urgency, Scheler argued, by the variety of apparently incommensurable conceptions of man now available to us. These are: (1) the Judaeo-Christian account of man in terms of original sin and the fall from paradise; (2) the Greek and Enlightenment conception of man as a creature qualitatively distinguished from all other animals by his divine spark of reason; (3) the modern scientific conception of man as no more than a highly developed animal. Scheler also mentions two other variants: (4) man is a biological dead-end, his life and vitality sapped by 'spirit', science, and technology (Klages and Nietzsche), and (5) once relieved of the suffocating tutelage of God, man can take his fate into his own hands and rise to the heights of a superman (Nicolai Hartmann and again Nietzsche). In his main work of anthropology, Man's Place in Nature (1928;tr. New York, 1961), Scheler gives an account of the biological , intellectual, and religious aspects of man ('life' and 'spirit'), attempting to combine what is true in all earlier conceptions. Philosophical anthropology should, he argues, show how all the 'works of man - language, conscience, tools, weapons, the state, leadership, the representational function of art, myths, religion, science, history, and social life - arise from the basic structure of human nature'. In Man and History (1926), he argued that different conceptions of man give rise to different conceptions of history, but that one of the tasks of anthropology is to give (in part to liberate ourselves from inherited preconceptions about man) a 'history of man's self-consciousness', that is, a history of man's ways of conceiving man. He did not live to complete more than a fraction of these tasks, but Helmuth Plessner, beginning with his Man and the Stages of the Organic (1929), attempted to give a similarly comprehensive and unitary account of man, both as a biological and as a rational creature.

Scheler regarded anthropology as an essential foundation for the social, historical, and psychological sciences. To this extent he is at odds with Husserl's phenomenology, which purports to provide the foundation for all science. It is less clear that Husserl was correct in associating anthropology with psychologism, the attempt to justify logical and mathematical laws by regarding them as generalizations about human psychology. (Husserl's 1931 lecture 'Phenomenology and Anthropology' mentions only Dilthey by name, but is also directed against Scheler and Heidegger.) For firstly, Scheler's anthropology is not much concerned with epistemology, the justification of our beliefs, and secondly, he argued that values are wholly objective, regardless of the historical and cultural variations in the degree and mode of our access to them. (A more recent philosophical anthropologist, Arnold Gehlen (1904-76), regards values and truth as cultural products.) Heidegger has a close affinity to Scheler's anthropology, but apart from (officially, at least) rejecting the presupposition-laden term 'man' (Mensch) in favour of Dasein, his central question is not 'What is man?' and 'What is man's place in the nature of things?' but 'What is being?' He argued that the nature and scope of philosophical anthropology and the grounds for assigning it a central place in philosophy are wholly unclear. These matters can be clarified not within philosophical anthropology, but only in a more fundamental discipline, namely 'fundamental ontology'.

Mr. M. J. Inwood, Trinity College, Oxford.

A. Gehlen, Der Mensch: seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Leipzig, 1940).

M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. J.S. Churchill (Bloomington, Ind., 1962).

H. Plessner, Laughter and Weeping, tr. J.S. Churchill and M. Grene (Evanston, Ill., 1970).

From the Oxford Companion to Philosophy