Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology

Anik Waldow

Nigel DeSouza

J. G. Herder is enjoying a renaissance in philosophy and across the humanities. This book offers important new insights into the complexity and depth of his thought. This unprecedented collection fills a gap in the secondary literature, highlighting the genuinely innovative and distinctive nature of Herder's philosophy. Not only does Herder offer highly original answers to important philosophical questions, such as the mind-body problem and the role of sensibility in cognition and ethics, he also opens up rich resources for thinking about the very nature of philosophy itself and its connections to other fields in the humanities and social sciences. Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology brings together a set of original essays that centre on the question at the heart of Herder's philosophical thought: How can philosophy enable an understanding of the human being that does not narrowly focus on its rational and moral capacities, but rather understands these in the context of its existence as a creature of nature that is fundamentally marked by a sensuous and affective openness and responsiveness to the world and other persons.The first part of the volume examines the various dimensions of Herder's philosophical understanding of human nature through which he sought methodologically to delineate a genuinely anthropological philosophy. The second part then examines further aspects of this understanding of human nature and what emerges from it: the human-animal distinction; how human life evolves over space and time on the basis of a natural order; the fundamentally hermeneutic dimension to human existence; and the interrelatedness of language, history, religion, and culture.

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Recenzii

This collection does much of what one would like a collection of essays to do. First, and importantly, it provides a nice, representative cross-section of Herder scholarship today, including pieces by established scholars whose work initiated and promoted philosophical scholarship on Herder -- such as Taylor, Heinz, Bollacher, Zammito, Forster, and Beiser -- as well as contributions from newer scholars (or scholars newer to Herder). It correspondingly treats many central themes in Herder's philosophical corpus, and does so from differing perspectives ... It not only represents the -- encouragingly flourishing -- state of scholarship on Herder, as noted, but also contributes fruitfully to that discussion, both in providing informative historical contextualization of Herder's views (Herder was a thinker deeply engaged with the thought of his contemporaries) and in raising interesting philosophical and interpretive questions.

Notă biografică

Anik Waldow is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. She mainly works in early modern philosophy and has published widely on the moral and cognitive function of sympathy, early modern theories of personal identity, scepticism and associationist theories of thought and language, and the influence of artifice and nature in the enlightenment debate. She is the author of the book David Hume and the Problem of Other Minds (Continuum, 2009), and co-edited Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Nature and Norms in Thought (Springer, 2013)Nigel DeSouza is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He works on the philosophy of Herder, early modern philosophy, and on contemporary ethics. He has published articles on Herder's metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and moral philosophy, as well as on the foundations of ethical agency. His articles have appeared in The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Intellectual History Review, Herder Yearbook, and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.