'Anthropology' tag archive

Der Mensch kann nur Mensch werden durch Erziehung. — Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 1803. 1 Few topics have in recent years caused more controversy in studies in the history of philosophy than the issue of Immanuel Kant’s conception of race and its significance for the universalism of his moral and political philosophy. In this […]

I submit that the current situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic and its biopolitical consequences reveals something new in the ontological status of the human species which also involves an anthropological ‘revolution’. 1 This is something more than the fact that the combined tendencies called ‘globalisation’ (which, regardless of whether we assign them a recent […]

1. As a younger activist I used to find it puzzling that some people who suffer the most from inequalities in capitalist society had little interest in radical egalitarian imaginaries, in the form of, for example, communal solidarity economies. 1 Certain individuals were attracted to groups defending those ideas only temporarily in crisis situations, when […]

Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon and Peter Skafish, eds, Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 364pp., £95.00 hb., £31.95 pb., 978 1 78348 857 5 hb., 978 1 78348 858 2 pb. ‘Sometimes one feels like one has nothing “new” to say,’ writes Eduardo Vivieros de Castro in his contribution to Comparative […]

Can anthropology be philosophy, and if so, how? For philosophers, the matter has been and often remains quite simple: anthropology’s concern with socio-cultural and historical differences might yield analyses that philosophy can put to use (provided that it condescends to examine them), but only rarely does anthropology conceive its material at a level of generality […]

contradictory claims r~ard1ng freedOm and necessity in the same work. An alternative approach to the determinism debate is the one adopted in Alienation which underscores the elastic meaninq of ‘ciCuse’ and ‘detelllLine’, but this doesn’t bring out adequately the reasohs for such variations. If Marx’s materialist conception of history, then, deals with the determining role […]

them, but they are arhitrary in the sense that there is no rationale behind them. [Radical Philosophy 5, p34J Klein, I think, must berated among the most perceptively biting of these cynics, these nasty people who try their damnedest to upset the cultural applecart. The Neo-Dadaists set out to shock the ‘cultured classes from their […]

Despite recent reassurances that ʻwe have never been modernʼ, owing to a conception of the modern based on the separation of nature from the order of society that has never functioned strictly according to the rules of its ʻconstitutionʼ, it is, nevertheless, this capacity to think the modern as temporally different from its antecedents that […]