Despite the appearance of variety in the papers published in this collection, they are the work of a monomaniac; or perhaps better, what Isaiah Berlin has called a hedgehog. If not a single idea, then at least a single rather tightly related agenda underlines all of them. If one had to find a name for where this agenda falls in the geography of philosophical domains, the term ‘philosophical anthropology’ would perhaps be best, although this term seems to make English-speaking philosophers uneasy.

I started on it with a polemical concern. I wanted to argue against the understanding of human life and action implicit in an influential family of theories in the sciences of man. The common feature of this family is the ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences. Theories of this kind seem to me to be terribly implausible. They lead to very bad science: either they end up in wordy elaborations of the obvious, or they fail altogether to address the interesting questions, or their practitioners end up squandering their talents and ingenuity in the attempt to show that they can after all recapture the insights of ordinary life in their manifestly reductive explanatory languages.

Indeed, one could argue that the second and third pitfalls should rather be seen as the horns of a dilemma: either these inadequate theories avoid the interesting questions, or they show themselves up, and hence have to expend more and more energy defending themselves against the charge of irrelevancy. Behaviourism offers the classical example.