Helmuth Plessner

Helmuth Plessner (1892 to 1985) was a German philosopher and sociologist, and a leading advocate of philosophical anthropology. His education moved between medicine, zoology and philosophy at Freiburg and Heidelberg, then phenomenology under Husserl at Göttingen; he took his doctorate at Erlangen in 1916 and wrote his habilitation at Cologne under Max Scheler. His masterwork, Levels of Organic Life and the Human (1928), argues that human beings are naturally artificial beings within living nature and tries to dissolve mind-body dualism by grounding consciousness in the way organisms realize their borders with their environment. He held a professorship at Cologne from 1926 until 1933, when he was forced out because of Jewish ancestry on his father's side, then lived in exile in Istanbul and the Netherlands. He took the chair of philosophy at Groningen in 1946 and returned to Germany in 1951 as professor of sociology at Göttingen, chairing the German Sociological Association from 1953 to 1959.