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Homo faber ( Latin for ' Man the Maker') is the concept that human beings are able to control their fate and their environment as a result of the use of tools.
In Latin literature, Appius Claudius Caecus uses this term in his Sententiæ, referring to the ability of man to control his destiny and what surrounds him: Homo faber suae quisque fortunae ("Every man is the artifex of his destiny").
In older anthropological discussions, Homo faber, as the "working man", is confronted with Homo ludens , the "playing man", who is concerned with amusements, humor, and leisure. It is also used in George Kubler's book, The Shape of Time as a reference to individuals who create works of art. [1]
The classic homo faber suae quisque fortunae was "rediscovered" by humanists in 14th century and was central in the Italian Renaissance.
In the 20th century, Max Scheler and Hannah Arendt made the philosophical concept central again.
Henri Bergson also referred to the concept in Creative Evolution (1907), defining intelligence, in its original sense, as the "faculty to create artificial objects, in particular tools to make tools, and to indefinitely variate its makings."
Homo Faber is the title of an influential novel by the Swiss author Max Frisch, published in 1957.
Political freedom is a central concept in history and political thought and one of the most important features of democratic societies. Political freedom has been described as freedom from oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions for an individual and the fulfillment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion, e.g. economic compulsion, in a society. Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action and the exercise of social or group rights. The concept can also include freedom from internal constraints on political action or speech. The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.
Hannah Arendt was a German-American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Appius Claudius Caecus was a statesman and writer from the Roman Republic. He is best known for two major building projects: the Appian Way, the first major Roman road, and the first aqueduct in Rome, the Aqua Appia.
Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the 1965 Jerusalem Prize, the 1973 Grand Schiller Prize, and the 1986 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Homo sacer is a figure of Roman law: a person who is banned and might be killed by anybody, but must not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes the concept as the starting point of his main work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998).
Max Ferdinand Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers, Scheler developed the philosophical method of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Given that school's utopian ambitions of re-founding all of human knowledge, Scheler was nicknamed the "Adam of the philosophical paradise" by José Ortega y Gasset.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was Hannah Arendt's first major work, where she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century.
Novus homo or homo novus was the term in ancient Rome for a man who was the first in his family to serve in the Roman Senate or, more specifically, to be elected as consul. When a man entered public life on an unprecedented scale for a high communal office, then the term used was novus civis or "new citizen".
Existential phenomenology encompasses a wide range of thinkers who take up the view that philosophy must begin from experience like phenomenology, but argues for the temporality of personal existence as the framework for analysis of the human condition.
Homo Faber may refer to:
Philosophical anthropology, sometimes called anthropological philosophy, is a discipline dealing with questions of metaphysics and phenomenology of the human person.
Voyager is a 1991 English-language drama film directed by Volker Schlöndorff and starring Sam Shepard, Julie Delpy, and Barbara Sukowa. Adapted by screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer from the 1957 novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch, the film is about a successful engineer traveling throughout Europe and the Americas whose world view based on logic, probability, and technology is challenged when he falls victim to fate, or a series of incredible coincidences.
The Human Condition, first published in 1958, is Hannah Arendt's account of how "human activities" should be and have been understood throughout Western history. Arendt is interested in the vita activa as contrasted with the vita contemplativa and concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about the vita activa and the way in which it has changed since ancient times. She distinguishes three sorts of activity and discusses how they have been affected by changes in Western history.
In addition to the generally accepted taxonomic name Homo sapiens, other Latin-based names for the human species have been created to refer to various aspects of the human character.
Homo Faber: A Report is a novel by Swiss author Max Frisch, first published in Germany in 1957. An English translation by Michael Bullock was published in Britain in 1959. The novel is written as a first-person narrative. The protagonist, Walter Faber, is a successful engineer traveling throughout Europe and the Americas on behalf of UNESCO. His world view based on logic, probability, and technology is challenged by a series of incredible coincidences as his repressed past and chance occurrences come together to break up his severely rational, technically oriented ideology.
Max Scheler (1874–1928) was an early 20th-century German Continental philosopher in the phenomenological tradition. Scheler's style of phenomenology has been described by some scholars as “applied phenomenology”: an appeal to facts or “things in themselves” as always furnishing a descriptive basis for speculative philosophical concepts. One key source of just such a pattern of facts is expressed in Scheler’s descriptive mapping of human emotional life as articulated in his seminal 1913–1916 work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values.
Max Scheler (1874–1928) was both the most respected and neglected of the major early 20th century German Continental philosophers in the phenomenological tradition. His observations and insights concerning "a special form of human hate" and related social and psychological phenomenon furnished a descriptive basis for his philosophical concept of "Ressentiment". As a widely recognized convention, the French spelling of this term has been retained in philosophical circles so as to preserve a broad sense of discursive meaning and application. Scheler died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1928 leaving a vast body of unfinished works. Extrapolations from his thoughts have always since piqued interest and discussion on a variety of topics. His works were on the Nazi book burn list.
Between Past and Future is a book written by the German-born Jewish American political theorist, Hannah Arendt, and first published in 1961, dealing with eight topics in political thinking.
Love and Saint Augustine was the title of Hannah Arendt's 1929 doctoral thesis. An English translation including revisions by Arendt was not published until 1996.