Human Reality Reconsidered: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and "Philosophical Anthropology"
PHIL 444
R. Schacht

Nietzsche argued that, in the aftermath of what he called "the death of God" and the demise of metaphysics, and in view of the limitations of the sciences, it was not only necessary but also of great importance to undertake a radical de-deifying, post-metaphysical and supra-scientific philosophical reinterpretation of human reality. Heidegger strongly agreed, and set about to do likewise, in a way that gave rise to what came to be known as "Existenz-philosophy," or the philosophy of (human) "existing." But so also did a group of thinkers who took a quite different tack than Heidegger did in Being and Time, and who embraced and promoted the idea of a "philosophical anthropology." In this course we will consider Heidegger's existential-phenomenological analysis of human reality, the treatments of human reality by the leading figures associated with the "philosophical-anthropological" alternative to it (Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner in particular), and the relation of Nietzsche's thinking on the matter to both. We will begin with Nietzsche. We then will spend the rest of the first half of the course on Heidegger's Being and Time, with a concluding glance at his later "Letter on Humanism." In the second half of the course we will look briefly at Max Scheler's Man's Place in Nature, then will spend most of the rest of the semester (roughly equally) on Gehlen's and Plessner's contrasting versions of a philosophical anthropology, and will conclude by looking at Ernst Cassirer's An Essay on Man.

Texts: Nietzsche: Selections (Prentice Hall), Heidegger's Being and Time (HarperSanFrancisco version preferred), and a course pack.

Requirements: several short papers, a longer paper, and a final (essay) examination. Prerequisites: some previous courses in philosophy, preferably including the history of early modern philosophy (Descartes to Kant), and some acquaintance with the history of modern philosophy after Kant.