The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

ZusammenfassungDie aktuelle philosophische Diskussion um eine angemessene Bestimmung des Todesbegriffes ist vor allem durch zwei konkurrierende Ansätze geprägt: Gemäß dem einen Ansatz ist der menschliche Tod der Tod des Körpers, gemäß dem anderen Ansatz der Tod der Person bzw. des Bewusstseinslebens. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt, dass beiden Ansätzen ein dualistisches und objektivistisches Verständnis des Menschen zugrunde liegt, dessen Anwendung in der Praxis zu zahlreichen Konflikten führt. Um diese Konflikte zu lösen, wird unter Rückgriff auf zentrale Einsichten der philosophischen Anthropologie Helmuth (...) Plessners ein integratives Konzept des menschlichen Todes entwickelt, das es erlaubt, die personale Perspektive auf den Tod einzubeziehen. Auf der Grundlage dieses Konzeptes erscheint es geboten, das Hirntodkriterium als Todeskriterium aufzugeben und die aktuellen Organspendekampagnen grundlegend neu auszurichten. (shrink)

This article compares Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s foundation of the Frankfurt Critical Theory with Helmuth Plessner’s foundation of Philosophical Anthropology. While Horkheimer’s and Plessner’s paradigms are mutually incompatible, Adorno’s „negative dialectics“ and Plessner’s „negative anthropology“ (G. Gamm) can be seen as complementing one another. Jürgen Habermas at one point sketched a complementary relationship between his own publicly communicative theory of modern society and Plessner’s philosophy of nature and human expressivity, and though he then came to doubt this, he (...) later reaffirmed it. Faced with the „life power“ in „high capitalism“ (Plessner), the ambitions for a public democracy in a pluralistic society have to be broadened from an argumentative focus (Habermas) to include the human condition and the expressive modes of our experience as essentially embodied persons. The article discusses some possible aspects of this complementarity under the title of a „critical anthropology“ (H. Schnädelbach). (shrink)

Plessner’s Stufen des Organischen questions both the conditions of possibility as well as the consequences of a self-understanding of life. Originally written against the background of urbanisation, industrialisation and colonisation, the strength of Plessner’s work lies in his combination of an analyticalphilosophical conceptualisation, the introduction of materiality and the body as well as his historical–ethical dimension. As a re-sult of this combination, Plessner’s approach is well suited to contribute to the current inter-national discourse on the relationship of sociality and materiality. (...) This article provides an overview of the reception of Plessner in Germany and embeds his approach into current de-bates, discussing its value with regard to the sociality-materiality relationship. The focus is on three issues: the definition of the boundaries of the social, the relationship between the social and the body as well as the cultural historic-ethical situation. Finally, Plessner’s Steps of the Organic are related to the current issues of ecologisation and digitalisation, allowing us to see what a Plessnerian perspective on the materiality-sociality relationship can do with-in applied social theory. (shrink)

J. Dewey and H. Plessner both and independently of one another treated the central question of what new task philosophy must set itself if the assumption is correct that the life-form of mind, i.e., the mental life-form of humans, arose in nature and must also sustain itself in the future within nature. If nature has to reconceived so as to make the irreducible qualities of life and mind truly possible, then it can no longer be restricted to the role of (...) physical material. Conversely humans cannot no longer take on the role of God outside and independent of nature. Instead these philosophers distinguish between three “plateaus” or “stages”, between physical nature, psycho-physical nature and the nature that is mental life. This distinction is drawn such that a connection between the plateaus is truly possible. The third level, that of the mental form of life, answers mentally within conduct to the break with the first two levels. Hence it depends in the future as well on the continuously renewed difference in our experience of nature. Within this difference nature as a whole remains an open unknown, which is why we can credit Dewey with a philosophy of diversified and negative holism, Plessner with a differential philosophy of the negativity of the absolute. (shrink)