1. Introduction: Philosophical Anthropology and Modernity

Western philosophy has had a long engagement with the philosophical-anthropological issue of the nature of and prospects for humanity. Aristotle, for instance, placed humans within a functional, organic, cosmic totality, where the part–whole relation between humans and the rest of nature ascribed the telos and proper flourishing of humans. Many seventeenth-century philosophers – rationalists like Descartes, materialists like Hobbes and empiricists like Locke – defined humans as rational, self-interested and atomistic. With eighteenth-century French Enlightenment thought – especially the idea of progress in the work of de Saint-Pierre, Turgot, Voltaire, d'Holbach, Helvetius and Condorcet – and nineteenth-century German idealism, especially Hegel, human nature itself is placed within the dimension of time (i.e., in history) signalling the birth of modernity as the master narrative of philosophical anthropology. According to this modern narrative, humanity was developing through its own linear historicity towards the ultimate fulfilment of its own nature. However, also beginning in the nineteenth century with German romanticism and continuing into the twentieth century with phenomenology and existentialism, the character of this human historicity itself became one of the central concerns of much of philosophical anthropology. To some extent, these Romantic, phenomenological and existentialist reflections on philosophical anthropology began to undermine the very notion of a single, substantive, human nature unfolding in a single ineluctable path of historical progress. Also, some work in anthropology did likewise (see Boas 1911). The combined effect of these reflections was a critique that put in doubt the philosophical-anthropological core of modernity. Modernity was now (and still is) in crisis.