%0 Journal Article
%T The metaphysical standing of the human: A future for the history of the human sciences
%A Steve Fuller
%J History of the Human Sciences
%@ 1461-720X
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0952695118807118
%X I reconstruct my own journey into the history of the human sciences, which I show to have been a process of discovering the metaphysical standing of the human. I begin with Alexandre Koyr¨¦¡¯s encounter with Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, which I use to throw light on the legacy of Kant¡¯s ¡®anthropological¡¯ understanding of the human, which dominated and limited 19th-century science. As I show, those who broke from Kant¡¯s strictures and set the stage for the 20th-century revolutions in science - from Hegel, to John McTaggart, to Max Weber - typically were pursuing crypto-theological questions about how a finite being can comprehend an infinite universe. This journey is about the ¡®common measure¡¯ of being human, which is what links Plato to Kuhn, but has been most consistently taken up by law. I suggest that in seeking this ¡®measure of man¡¯, we may discover that to be human is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens, which would suggest a radical reorientation of the history of the human sciences
%K anti-realism
%K Hegel
%K Kant
%K posthuman
%K transhuman
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695118807118