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Articles

What Makes Human Beings Unique?

Hans Lenk on symbols, interpretation and the nature of thought.

“He who understands the apes achieves more for metaphysics than Locke.”
Charles Darwin

Already in antiquity Poseidonius stressed the idea that ‘man’ is by nature indispensably dependent on culture. Poseidonius was probably the first author to use the expression ‘second nature’, as a central concept of his anthropology, for his doctrine of the origin of culture. Much later Johann Herder used the same concept for his thesis of humans as characterized by deficiencies and incompletenesses which necessitate the development of language and culture. Helmuth Plessner further developed the idea of our cultural second nature in his more modern philosophical anthropology.

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