Publisher's Synopsis
Research on the subject to date has largely interpreted the paradigmatic shift in late-Enlightenment anthropology (approx. 1750-1800) as a unified process, and has discussed the various fields of study in isolation. The present volume takes a different course. It insists on the close connection between constructivist and subject-related logic in anthropology, and interprets it in terms of a process of increasing differentiation within the contest between the rival views of man as a physical and moral animal. The various articles discuss the following topics and/or interpretive procedures: the relationship between soma and pneuma; the self-generation of man in the process of natural history; anthropology and the genesis of civilization; empiricism as an anthropological form of epistemology; anthropology and utopia; fictional anthropology as an epistemological approach; philosophy, science, and myth.
