Article ID: CBB332228071

The Metaphysical Standing of the Human: A Future for the History of the Human Sciences (2019)

unapi

I reconstruct my own journey into the history of the human sciences, which I show to have been a process of discovering the metaphysical standing of the human. I begin with Alexandre Koyré’s encounter with Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, which I use to throw light on the legacy of Kant’s ‘anthropological’ understanding of the human, which dominated and limited 19th-century science. As I show, those who broke from Kant’s strictures and set the stage for the 20th-century revolutions in science - from Hegel, to John McTaggart, to Max Weber - typically were pursuing crypto-theological questions about how a finite being can comprehend an infinite universe. This journey is about the ‘common measure’ of being human, which is what links Plato to Kuhn, but has been most consistently taken up by law. I suggest that in seeking this ‘measure of man’, we may discover that to be human is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens, which would suggest a radical reorientation of the history of the human sciences.

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Authors & Contributors
Fisher, A. R. J.
Kwangsu Kim
Carlo Altini
Baier, Sabine
Zwart, Hub
Gundling, TJ
Concepts
Philosophy
Human sciences
Definition of human; human nature
Metaphysics
Human beings
History of science, as a discipline
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
19th century
20th century, late
18th century
17th century
Places
Germany
Latin America
Europe
Institutions
Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main
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