Herder. Physiologie und philosophische Anthropologie Herder. Physiology and philosophical anthropology Herder. Physiologie et anthropologie philosophique De En Fr

Résumé En

In eighteenth-century Germany, a new field of philosophical anthropology emerged, signaling a profound reconfiguration of what, originally, in the Renaissance, was primarily a medical and anatomical discipline. This paper focuses on Herder's contribution to this development and investigates its medical and physiological context. Set in the context of the long history of anthropology, Herder's philosophy can be seen as a response to recent discoveries in medicine and physiology. The major impulse came from Albrecht von Haller's new distinction between the irritability of muscle and the sensibility of nerves, that he first presented in the 1740s and 1750s. Haller's limitation (and close association) of sensation and thought to particular bodily structures challenged major philosophical and theological dogmas insofar as it raised new questions about the existence of an immaterial soul and its ability to cause what the mind perceives as a voluntary motion. It blurred the traditional division of labours, the one ascribing the physician the task of investigating the body and leaving the study of the soul to the philosopher and the theologian. The chapter will explore how Herder makes creative use of Haller's concept of irritability, in particular, as a way of demonstrating a neo-Aristotelian account of the soul as pervading and informing the entire body. It would be insufficient to view Enlightenment philosophical anthropology as merely a reformatory movement internal to philosophy. A glance at the disciplinary history of anthropology reveals, on the contrary, that it was a response on behalf of philosophy to changes affecting philosophy from the outside. More specifically, it was an attempt on behalf of philosophy to 1 I would like to thank Nigel DeSouza and Anik Waldow for their precious editorial and stylistic help with this article, for sharing their own work on these matters with me, and for the fruitful philosophical discussions. And thanks to Fred Beiser for his l comments on a previous draft of this paper, on Herder's materialism. 2 Dedicated to my former colleague at the university Paris 8 Saint-Denis Pierre Pénisson. In memoriam.