ABSTRACT
The collaboration of philosophy and anthropology in the effort to understand ethical theory and develop its implications for modern life seems a natural one. Philosophy runs a speculative-analytical workshop and anthropology has a flourishing descriptive-comparative laboratory. Each would seem to have some need of the other. The tendency to preserve sharp lines in any scientific partnership is still strong in philosophy today, but the present writers believe that some of the lines that are drawn are arbitrary ones, which interfere with the full formulation of common problems. The enterprises of description, analysis, causal investigation and evaluation certainly have to be kept distinct, but not as separate provinces to be parcelled out to philosophers and social scientists. It is possible for philosophy to use the psychological and social science materials without blunting its analytic precision or confusing subtle phenomenological description with causal explanation, and without violating the integrity of evaluation.
