The soul is the principle of life …«

Karl Bühler’s contribution to anthropological thought

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, Karl Bühler has contributed to an axiomatics of psychology and to the theory of language, but implicitly also to questions concerning man. An overview of the sources Bühler uses – not only scientific articles or books, but his correspondence with colleagues from all sorts of disciplines as well – shows a genuine interest in a broad range of scientific domains. Representatives of the emerging science of philosophical anthropology at the beginning of the 20th century like Max Scheler, Hans Driesch or Helmuth Plessner and many other »anthropologists« appearing in handbooks of philosophical anthropology (e.g., Aristotle, Husserl) are discussed in Bühler’s work. On the other hand, contemporary authors have dealt with Bühler’s thoughts in their own works, published in the 1920s and 1930s. Such relationships in Bühler’s philosophical-anthropological fundamental thoughts will be reconstructed and discussed in this contribution.