Table Of Contenti
IMISCOE RESEARCH
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Helmut Plessner (1892-1985) was one of the founders of philosophical an- d
e
thropology, and his book The Levels of the Organic and Man [Die Stufen des M
Organischen und der Mensch], first published in 1928, has inspired generations u
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of philosophers, biologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. This e
d
volume offers the first substantial introduction to Plessner’s philosophical .)
anthropology in English, not only setting it in context with such familiar
figures as Bergson, Cassirer, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, but also showing
Plessner’s relevance to contemporary discussions in a wide variety of fields
in the humanities and sciences, such as biology, neurosciences, psychology,
sociology, cultural anthropology, philosophy of mind, and technology studies.
Jos de Mul is full professor Philosophy of Man and Culture at the Faculty of
Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has also taught at the Univer-
sity of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Fudan University (Shanghai), and stayed as
a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His book
P
publications include: Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Art and Philosophy
l
e Edited by Franck Düvell, Irina Molodikova & Michael Collyer
(State University of New York Press, 1999), The Tragedy of Finitude. Dilthey’s s
s
Hermeneutics of Life (Yale University Press, 2004), Cyberspace Odyssey. n
e
Towards a Virtual Ontology and Anthropology (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, r
’s
2010), and Destiny Domesticated. The Rebirth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of P
Technology (State University of New York Press, 2014). h
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h Plessner’s Philosophical
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a Perspectives and Prospects
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Anthropology
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Edited by Jos de Mul
ISBN: 978-90-8964-634-7
AUP.nl
9 789089 646347
Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology
Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology
Perspectives and Prospects
Edited by
Jos de Mul
Amsterdam University Press
Cover illustration: © Helmuth Plessner Gesellschaft e.V., www.helmuth-plessner.de
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden
Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
ISBN 978 90 8964 634 7
e-ISBN 978 90 4852 298 9 (pdf)
NUR 761
© Jos de Mul / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2014
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Contents
Foreword 9
Artificial by Nature 11
An Introduction to Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology
Jos de Mul
Part I Anthropology
1 Philosophical Anthropology 41
A Third Way between Darwinism and Foucaultism
Joachim Fischer
2 The Nascence of Modern Man 57
Two Approaches to the Problem – Biological Evolutionary Theory
and Philosophical Anthropology
Hans-Peter Krüger
3 “True” and “False” Evolutionism 79
Bergson’s Critique of Spencer, Darwin & Co. and Its Relevance for
Plessner (and Us)
Heike Delitz
4 Life, Concept and Subject 99
Plessner’s Vital Turn in the Light of Kant and Bergson
Thomas Ebke
5 Bodily Experience and Experiencing One’s Body 111
Maarten Coolen
6 Plessner and the Mathematical-Physical Perspective 129
The Prescientific Objectivity of the Human Body
Jasper van Buuren
7 The Body Exploited 149
Torture and the Destruction of Selfhood
Janna van Grunsven
8 Plessner’s Theory of Eccentricity 163
A Contribution to the Philosophy of Medicine
Oreste Tolone
9 The Duty of Personal Identity 177
Authenticity and Irony
Martino Enrico Boccignone
Part II Culture
10 Anthropology as a Foundation of Cultural Philosophy 195
The Connection between Human Nature and Culture by Helmuth
Plessner and Ernst Cassirer
Henrike Lerch
11 Bi-Directional Boundaries 211
Eccentric Life and Its Environments
Robert Mugerauer
12 The Unbearable Freedom of Dwelling 229
Jetske van Oosten
13 Eccentric Positionality and Urban Space 243
Huib Ernste
14 Strangely Familiar 261
The Debate on Multiculturalism and Plessner’s Philosophical
Anthropology
Kirsten Pols
15 De-Masking as a Characteristic of Social Work? 275
Veronika Magyar-Haas
16 Helmuth Plessner as a Social Theorist 289
Role Playing in Legal Discourse
Bas Hengstmengel
17 Habermas’s New Turn towards Plessner’s Philosophical
Anthropology 301
Matthias Schloβberger
Part III Technology
18 The Quest for the Sources of the Self , Seen from the Vantage
Point of Plessner’s Material a Priori 317
Petran Kockelkoren
19 The Brain in the Vat as the Epistemic Object of Neurobiology 335
Gesa Lindemann
20 Switching “On,” Switching “Off” 357
Does Neurosurgery in Parkinson’s Disease Create Man-Machines?
Johannes Hätscher
21 On Humor and “Laughing” Rats 375
The Importance of Plessner for Affective Neuroscience
Heleen J. Pott
22 A Moral Bubble 387
The Influence of Online Personalization on Moral Repositioning
Esther Keymolen
23 E ccentric Positionality as a Precondition for the Criminal
Liability Of Artificial Life Forms 407
Mireille Hildebrandt
24 Not Terminated 425
Cyborgized Men Still Remain Human Beings
Dierk Spreen
25 Plessner and Technology 443
Philosophical Anthropology Meets the Posthuman
Peter-Paul Verbeek
26 Philosophical Anthropology 2.0 457
Reading Plessner in the Age of Converging Technologies
Jos de Mul
Appendix 477
Plessner’s Collected Writings (Gesammelte Schriften)
About the Authors 481
Name Index 489
Subject Index 495
Foreword
The works of the German biologist, philosopher and sociologist Helmuth
Plessner (1892-1985) have remained relatively unknown to the English-
speaking world until now. Without doubt, one of the most important reasons
for this is the fact that so far only a few of his works has been translated into
English. Moreover, the majority of the large corpus of secondary literature
is also in German. For these reasons, the “Plessner Renaissance” that took
place in the past decades went largely unnoticed among English scholars
in the humanities and in the natural and social sciences. In order to widen
the audience, the organizers of the IVth International Plessner Confer-
ence at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2009, which was devoted to
Plessner’s magnum opus, The Levels of the Organic and Man: An Introduction
to Philosophical Anthropology [Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch.
Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, originally published in 1928],
decided to hold the entire conference in English. Although the confer-
ence did not attract a large group of participants from English-speaking
countries, it resulted, for the first time in the history of Plessner scholarship,
in a substantive collection of papers on Plessner’s philosophical anthropol-
ogy written in English.1 The present volume contains a selection of the
papers presented at that conference, offering an excellent introduction to a
philosopher whose work has proven to be inspiring for several generations
of scholars.
I wish to thank Dr. Maarten Coolen from the University of Amsterdam,
and Prof. Dr. Huib Ernste from Radboud University of Nijmegen, who acted
as co-organizers of the IVth International Plessner Conference and helped
1 As only some of Plessner’s works have been translated so far, the papers presented at the
Rotterdam Plessner conference lacked a uniform translation of Plessner’s key terms. In some
cases it was just a matter of different spelling. For example, whereas in some contributions the
German exzentrisch was translated as “eccentric”, in other papers “excentric” was used. In other
cases the differences concerned the entire word. The German Grenze for example, was translated
as “boundary” by some authors and as “border” by others. In order to avoid conceptual confusion,
in almost all cases the editorial choice has been a uniform translation. For that reason, the word
exzentrisch is consistently translated as eccentric (a motivation for this particular choice is given
in footnote 2 on page 12). However, in a few cases where different translations were caused by
differences in context, for which the English language has different words, the choice has been
made to keep the different translations. For that reason the German Grenze is translated with
“boundary”, but in some cases as “border”. When an author used synonyms for stylistic reasons
(for example by alternatively using “corporeality” and “corporeity”), the different translations
have also been maintained.
