Philosophy and anthropology have long been intellectual companions. In European continental philosophy in particular, the boundaries between the two disciplines have always been very porous. One thinks at once of the largely German project to construct a philosophy of man and of human's place in nature (a project broadly known as philosophical anthropology), the constant border crossings between anthropology and philosophy of notable individuals such as Paul Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, and the importation into British analytical philosophy by way of Ludwig Wittgenstein of concerns that can only be called anthropological. Although from the other side of the disciplinary boundary anthropology has rarely been reflective about its own philosophical presuppositions, in practice anthropologists constantly bring particular and often unexamined philosophical and ontological positions to their supposedly empirical analyses. For example, anthropologies inspired by Durkheim are deeply rooted in Kantian philosophy, Evans-Pritchard's ideas are stamped with R. G. Collingwood's Hegelian philosophy, Max Gluckman was stimulated by Whitehead's process philosophy, and Pierre Bourdieu drew inspiration from Wittgenstein and Pascal, among others. An earlier generation of anthropologists had no hesitation about exploring the philosophical notions of ‘primitive’ man (Radin [1927] 1957).

Yet the fuller implications of shifting philosophical influences in anthropology are rarely addressed. In this volume we propose that the implications of these influences call on the one hand for a deeper investigation of the philosophical presuppositions of anthropology, and on the other for a deep questioning of the philosophical presuppositions themselves from the comparative-cultural view of anthropology and in particular of ethnography.