BiblioVault - Books about Plessner, Helmuth

Laughing and Crying

A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior

Helmuth Plessner; Translated from the German by James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene and with a new foreword by J. M. Bernstein

Northwestern University Press, 2020

First published in German in 1940 and widely recognized as a classic of philosophical anthropology, Laughing and Crying is a detailed investigation of these two particularly significant types of expressive behavior, both in themselves and in relation to human nature. Elaborating the philosophical account of human life he developed in Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, Plessner suggests that laughing and crying are expressions of a crisis brought about in certain situations by the relation of a person to their body.

With a new foreword by J. M. Bernstein that situates the book within the broader framework of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and his richly suggestive and powerful account of human bodily life, Laughing and Crying is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of the body, emotions, and human behavior.

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Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology

Perspectives and Prospects

Jos de Mul

Amsterdam University Press, 2014

Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) was one of the founders of philosophical anthropology, and his book The Stages of the Organic and Man, first published in 1928, has inspired generations of philosophers, biologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. This volume offers the first substantial introduction to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology in English, not only setting it in context with such familiar figures as Bergson, Cassirer, and Merleau-Ponty, but also showing Plessner’s relevance to contemporary discussions in a wide variety of fields in the humanities and sciences.

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Political Anthropology

Helmuth Plessner, Translated from the German by Nils F. Schott, Edited and with an introduction by Heike Delitz and Robert Seyfert and an epilogue by Joachim Fischer

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In Political Anthropology (originally published in 1931 as Macht und menschliche Natur), Helmuth Plessner considers whether politics—conceived as the struggle for power between groups, nations, and states—belongs to the essence of the human. Building on and complementing ideas from his Levels of the Organic and the Human (1928), Plessner proposes a genealogy of political life and outlines an anthropological foundation of the political. In critical dialogue with thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, and Martin Heidegger, Plessner argues that the political relationships cultures entertain with one other, their struggle for acknowledgement and assertion, are expressions of certain possibilities of the openness and unfathomability of the human.

Translated into English for the first time, and accompanied by an introduction and an epilogue that situate Plessner's thinking both within the context of Weimar-era German political and social thought and within current debates, this succinct book should be of great interest to philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists interested in questions of power and the foundations of the political.

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