Man and Future: a Palaeontological and Chronological Foundation of Cassirer's Definition of Man as Animal Symbolicum
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Date
2017
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Wydawnictwo Naukowe Instytutu Filozofii UAM
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Abstract
In the present paper, the author aims at laying the foundations of a
symbolics of technical gesture, according to the thesis that symbolic faculty
is another face of the technological one, and that they are both in truth two
sides of the same coin. Accordingly, the author suggests to rename the whole
dimen-sion as “meta-environmentality”. The analysis is carried out on the
basis of a specific comparison between Cassirer’s definition of “animal
symbolicum” and its scientific consistence in the light of modern
palaeontology. “Animal symbol-icum” is here compared with Leroi-Gourhan’s
homo technologicus, and Cassi-rer’s ideas on human identity tested starting
from paleoanthropological data. The result of the inquiry lead us to recognize
the urgency of integrating Cassi-rer’s argument with the primacy of the
technological capacity, but a deep anal-ysis of the characterizing attributes
of the latter compels us to uphold the symbolic attitude of the
technological dimension. The author then sketches a basic description of the
guidelines of a symbolic theory of technology (espe-cially §§ 6-7), and tries
to show how the basic elements of such an approach were familiar both to
Cassirer and Leroi-Gourhan. As a consequence of the whole theory, the
author elaborates a chronological analysis of human identity, whose basic
result is the determination of the future as main temporal dimen-sion of
human acting.
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Philosophy of Culture, Philosophical Anthropology, Philosophy of Palaeoanthropology, Cassirer, Leroi-Gourhan
Citation
Ethics in Progress (ISSN 2084-9257). Vol. 8 (2017). No. 1, Art. #2, pp. 12-40. Doi: 10.14746/eip.2017.1.2
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2084-9257