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Trends in Philosophical Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology in Postwar Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Hermann Wein
Hermann Wein*
Affiliation:
University of Göttingen
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Extract

The semantic confusion in Europe about the term “anthropology” has of late been considerable. On the one hand there is meant by it, and quite justifiably, human biology and medical anthropology. On the other hand, the work of some contemporary thinkers, under the name of “philosophical anthropology,” has recently gone beyond the narrower compass. This has been noticeable at both the German and the international European philosophical conventions since the last war. In addition to this, there appeared the term “Kulturanthropologie,”—for the first time probably as the title of E. Rothacker's contribution to Systematische Philosophie, a collection of essays edited by Nicolai Hartmann and published in 1942. But “Kulturanthropologie,” in Rothacker's sense, is not a translation of “cultural anthropology,” which has in recent years grown to such eminence among scholarly fields in England and America. In the United States, (1) “anthropology” designates a group of scholarly fields ranging on the one hand from biological anthropology to archaeology and the study of the beginnings of history on the other, often including history, linguistics, and other realms of research; (2) it is neither one of the natural sciences nor of the humanities but one of the social sciences; and (3) the actually new results of this young discipline, especially at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, are arrived at by means of team work by anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists, which in Germany has not been the case so far.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 1957 , pp. 46 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © 1957, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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Footnotes

†

Enlarged and revised English version of my contribution to Deutscher Seistzwischengestern und morgen, ed. by Yoachim Moras & Hans Paeschke, Stuttgart 1954.

References

1 S. R. Thurnwald, Aufbau und Sinn der Völkerwissenschaft (1947); K. Dittmer, Allgemeine Völkerkunde (1954).

2 Wiesbaden, 1951.

3 The two foremost American cultural anthropologists, A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, recently published a monograph on the relation of the concept of “culture” especially to the German concept of “Kultur”: “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” Papers of the Penbody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. XLVII, no. 1 (1952). Among the strongest advocates of collaboration between philosophy and the social sciences or cultural anthropology are the well known scholars John Collier and Laura Thompson-Collier. In Göttingen, I am at present directing a doctoral dissertation on the bearing of cultural anthropology upon the general philosophical problem of relativism.

4 Philosophie der Geschichte (Glockner), p. 101.

5 A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology, 2nd ed. (1948). Cf. R. Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality (1945); M. Herskovits, Man and His Works (1949); and the British cultural anthropologists A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and R. Firth. Perhaps the most interesting study in this connection is Experiments in Living (1953), the Gifford Lectures of 1948–49, by A. Macbeath, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Belfast.

6 A. L. Kroeber, “Der Begriff der Kultur in der Wissenschaft,” in: Perspektiven (1953).

7 Nicolai Hartmann, Das Problem des geistigen Seins, 2nd ed. (1949), p. 190.

8 In: Nicolai Hartmann. Der Denker und sein Werk, edited by H. Heimsoeth and R. Heiss (1952).

9 For the relation of tradition and progress, see especially H. Freyer, Weltgeschichte Europas (1948).

10 See. H. Wein, “Von Descartes zur heutigen Anthropologie,” Zeitschr. f. phil. Forschung (1948); H. Wein, “Thesen zur Humanität,” Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie (1950).

11 Cf. N. Hartmann's discussion of this: “Neue Anthropologie in Deutschland,” Blätter für deutsche Philosophie (1941–42); as well as my critique of it in “Die deutsche Philosophie der letzten Jahre,” Part II, in Forschungen und Fortschritte (1944).

12 In Zeitschr. f. phil. Forschung (1949); the next two essays in Merkur (1950 and 1953).

13 p. 141. See also E. Rothacker's “Bausteine zur Kulturanthropologie” in Vierkandt-Festschrift.

14 1950; the following quotations are discussed in the chapter entitled “Inner-menschliches Gegensatz-Problem,” in my book on relativism and, along with others, are taken from Der Wille zur Macht (Kröner ed., XVI) and C. G. Jung, Das Unbeumsste in normalen und kranken Seelenleben (1926).

15 A rare opportunity for this was provided by the German Philosophical Convention of 1950, in Bremen. Cf. the report of proceedings, Symphilosophein (1953).

16 His longer essays are collected in Zwischen Philosophie und Gesellschaft (1953).

17 See also H. Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (1924).

18 The work of Hans Hartmann, as yet too little known, in which linguistic scholarship and cultural anthropological and philosophical points of view are fruitfully combined, consists of the following: Der Totenkult in Irland. Ein Beitrag zur Religion der Indogermanen (1952); Das Passiv. Eine Studie zur Geistesgeschichte der Kelten, Italiker und Arier (1954).

19 Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (introduction).