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The book presents a critical retrospection of the evolution of the conception of the human being in European thought, from the first conceptualization of man in Aristotle to the theory of practices of the Self by Michel Foucault. In the prism of the present-day anthropological situation the way of anthropology looks correlative to the way of philosophy according to Heidegger: the “forgetting of being” finds its correlate in the “forgetting of man”. After touching briefly upon initial stages of European anthropology, the book concentrates on disclosing the genesis of the “antianthropologism” of classical metaphysics in Descartes and Kant. From the chosen angle, Hegel's System represents the extreme point of the antianthropological trend, and the philosophy of Hegel's opponent, Kierkegaard, the starting point of the opposite trend, the return to man. The beginning and the end (for the present) of this trend are given the main place: the anthropologies of Kierkegaard and the late Foucault are reconstructed in detail. In the interval between them we only consider Nietzsche and Heidegger (since no anthropological retrospection is thinkable without them) and Scheler (just briefly, as an interesting example showing how all the chances opened for anthropological thought by phenomenology can be missed completely).

The goals of the retrospection are far from simple description. The book aims at reading the history of anthropological thought in the light of topical problems of this thought which tries to reflect afresh upon its own foundations as well as the status and place of anthropology in the complex of the humanities. These fundamental problems are considered on the basis of synergetic anthropology, a new anthropological approach developed by the author. In the last chapter synergetic anthropology plays an explicit role: making its systematic comparison with the theory of practices of the Self we outline possible strategies of the advancement to new anthropology.