As is well known, and as the editors emphasize, the topic of philosophical anthropology has fallen on hard times in recent decades, to the point that it virtually ceased to occupy the attention of both philosophers and professional anthropologists. This neglect stands in stark contrast to the situation prevailing in Europe in the early and middle part of the last century, which can be described as the heyday of philosophical anthropology. The basic aim of the present volume is to rescue the topic from oblivion, and more specifically to recover the older European legacy while transforming it in the light of more recent experiences and intellectual developments.

It so happens that my own youth and early intellectual development stood strongly under the influence of the cited European legacy. A major intellectual figure shaping my early years was that of Max Scheler – certainly a leading mentor of philosophical anthropology at the time. It was Scheler's central ambition to overcome the dualisms marking modern Western thought, including the bifurcation of a shallow empiricism and an abstract (Cartesian/Kantian) rationalism – an aim which brought him into the proximity of the early Heidegger. Through his study Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (The place of man in the cosmos, of 1927), Scheler had established himself as the leading protagonist of a perspective in which the more elusive universalist accents of Enlightenment philosophy were fruitfully combined with the more concrete concerns of anthropology and human biology.