A Plea for a Pragmatist Anthropology

In this paper, I defend the claim that a philosophical anthropology inspired by the Classical Pragmatists, while being explicitly naturalistic, can avoid biological reductionism and environmental determinism, as well as dogmatic forms of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, insofar as it offers a picture of human nature as historical and contingent, dynamically constituted through interactions with a natural, naturally social, and enculturated environment. Cultural naturalism, I suggest, provides the theoretical framework for a pragmatist anthropology that includes at least two pivotal claims. The first is the idea that continuity is not linear but circular: it implies a kind of feedback action of new organizations of resources and energies on pre-existing forms of organic-environmental interaction. A second claim regards an anti-transcendental stance, emphasizing that the transformation of animal environments into a highly social, habitualized, and enlanguaged environment is entirely contingent, albeit irreversible, and makes a capital difference within the continuity of animal life.