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Phenomenology and Anthropology

Subject Area History of Philosophy
Theoretical Philosophy
Term from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 394451568
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The Heisenberg Professorship at the University of Cologne aimed to relate phenomenology and anthropology to each other on the basis of historical analyses and to apply them systematically to various current problems in philosophy and the humanities and cultural studies. In particular, the areas of (a) phenomenological psychology, as it can be reconstructed from Edmund Husserl’s work, and (b) interdisciplinary anthropology, as it has been recognized as a desideratum in recent years and propagated as a research cooperative, were dealt with. An intersectional topic was the comprehensive exploration of (c) empathy, including aesthetics and the philosophy of technology (possibilities and limits of empathy with artefacts) as well as human resilience and vulnerability. The University of Cologne proved to be the ideal location for the professorship, partly due to its historical significance for phenomenology and philosophical anthropology. In addition to the Husserl Archives, which enjoys international recognition as the most important German institution in the field of editorial indexing of Husserl’s legacy, important thinkers such as Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner worked at the university and had a decisive influence on the development of this philosophical movement. Against this background, the Heisenberg Professorship aimed to critically review and reflect on previous attempts to explicitly link phenomenology and anthropology into a genuine "phenomenological anthropology", as envisaged by Hans Blumenberg, for example, which is currently an important trend also in empirically oriented ethnography. The tension between Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and philosophical anthropology was taken into account. The question of the compatibility of the qualitative experiential perspective of the first person with the consideration of life forms from the perspective of the third person is central here in order to develop an integrative perspective on the complexity and variability of human life forms. In view of recent developments, interfaces to other disciplines such as social and cultural anthropology as well as evolutionary anthropology and comparative cognitive psychology have also been identified. The systematic question of what constitutes a phenomenological-anthropological approach and in which areas it can be applied has been dealt with comprehensively, as the list of publications shows. In addition, the professorship has been able to provide important impulses for the research strategy of the University of Cologne, for example by participating in the new Cluster of Excellence application "Sharing a Planet in Peril" and by strengthening internationalization (e.g., a newly established cooperation partnership with Kyoto).

Publications

 
 

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