Philosophical anthropology

Origins and terminology

In the 18th century, “anthropology” was the branch of philosophy that gave an account of human nature. At that time, almost everything in the domain of systematic knowledge was understood to be a branch of philosophy. Physics, for example, was still known as “natural philosophy,” and the study of economics had developed as a part of “moral philosophy.” At the same time, anthropology was not where the main work of philosophy was done. As a branch of philosophy it served, instead, as a kind of review of the implications for human nature of philosophically more central doctrines, and it may have incorporated a good deal of empirical material that would now be thought of as belonging to psychology. Because the field of study was a part of philosophy, it did not have to be explicitly so described.

By the end of the 19th century, anthropology and many other disciplines had established their independence from philosophy. Anthropology emerged as a branch of the social sciences that studied the biological and evolutionary history of human beings (physical anthropology), as well as the culture and society that distinguished Homo sapiens from other animal species (cultural anthropology). In their study of social and cultural institutions and practices, anthropologists typically focused on the less highly developed societies, further distinguishing anthropology from sociology.

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As a result of these developments, the term philosophical anthropology is not in familiar use among anthropologists and would probably not meet with any ready comprehension from philosophers either, at least in the English-speaking world. When anthropology is conceived in contemporary terms, philosophical thought might come within its purview only as an element in the culture of some society that is under study, but it would be very unlikely to have any part to play in an anthropologist’s work or in the way human nature is conceived for the purposes of that work. To put the matter somewhat differently, anthropology is now regarded as an empirical scientific discipline, and, as such, it discounts the relevance of philosophical theories of human nature. The inference here is that philosophical (as opposed to empirical) anthropology would almost certainly be bad anthropology.

These views reflect a positivistic conception of scientific knowledge and the negative judgment of philosophy that typically goes with it. According to this view, philosophy, like religion, belongs to a period in the history of thought that has passed; it has been replaced by science and no longer has any real contribution to make to inquiries that conform to the rigorous epistemic or cognitive norms set by the natural sciences. It follows that the application of the adjective philosophical—not just to anthropology, but to any discipline at all—has fallen out of favour. The only exception would be when the philosophical aspect of the discipline in question is confined to epistemological and logical matters and remains quite distinct from the substantive inquiries in which that discipline engages.

Any mention of the “philosophy of physics,” the “philosophy of history,” or even the “philosophy of anthropology” almost always pertains to philosophy in this narrower sense. Many philosophers have signaled an acceptance of this limitation on their work by concentrating their attention on language as the medium through which logical issues can be expressed. When other philosophers claim that they still have something substantive and distinctive to say about human nature, their work is customarily categorized as “philosophical anthropology,” thus avoiding the confusion that the old usage might cause. This term is also applied to the older accounts of human nature by philosophers whose work predated such distinctions. For the purposes of this discussion, however, the primary reference of the term philosophical anthropology will be to the period in which these ambiguities developed.

The concept of the “soul-mind”

Despite the terminological changes that developed over time, philosophers who have considered questions of human nature have demonstrated substantial continuity in the types of issues they have studied. In both old and new approaches, the principal focus of philosophical interest has been a feature of human nature that has long been central to self-understanding. In simple terms, it is the recognition that human beings have minds—or, in more traditional parlance, souls. Long before recorded history, the soul was understood to be that part of human nature that made life, motion, and sentience possible. Since at least the 19th century the actuality of the soul has been hotly contested in Western philosophy, usually in the name of science, especially as the vital functions once attributed to it were gradually explained by normal physical and physiological processes.

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But even though its defenders no longer apply the term widely, the concept of the soul has endured. Within philosophy it has been progressively refined to the point of being transformed into the concept of mind as that part of human nature wherein intellectual and moral powers reside. At the same time, many of the ideas traditionally associated with the soul—immortality, for example—have been largely abandoned by philosophy or assigned to religion. Among a wider public, however, the word soul is arguably more familiar and comprehensible than mind, especially as an expression of what humans conceive of as their “inner reality.” For the purposes of this discussion, therefore, the two terms will be used in their appropriate contexts and, occasionally, in a compound form, the “soul-mind.”