Philosophical Anthropology

The philosophical study of human nature is as old as philosophy itself; nevertheless, a distinct field known as “philosophical anthropology” was explicitly delineated in the early 20th Century, above all in the work of Max Scheler. One of the hallmarks of the thought of John Paul II, himself influenced by Scheler, was the central significance he gave to anthropology in his approach to problems in both philosophy and theology. The first half of this course will be a careful study of the classical interpretation of human nature, above all the understanding of the relation between the body and the soul, through a reading of Plato, Aristotle, and the “Treatise on Man” in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. The second half will be a reading of programmatic texts by Max Scheler and an exploration of Karol Wojtyła’s/Pope John Paul II’s integration of the modern philosophical anthropology with the classical interpretation of man inside of a theological vision of the nature and destiny of the human being. Some of the main themes explored are the nature of the human soul, the relationship between the soul and body, the relationship between self and other as expressed in the structure of the acts of intellect and will, the relationship between human nature and nature more generally, man’s place in the cosmos, and man’s fundamental relationship to God in all of this.