ABSTRACT
The question ‘what is a human being?’ is as old as philosophy itself, but over the past century we witness a major change in the way this question has been raised in the humanities and the social sciences. In this chapter, Chernilo reconstructs the trajectory of this question in five periods: the rise of philosophical anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, the debate between Sartre and Heidegger at the end of World War Two, the anti-humanist critique between the 1960s and the 1990s, the contemporary posthuman turn and recent attempts at renewing anthropological enquiries. Chernilo contends that most and normative questions of the present are ultimately underpinned by specific ideas of the human.
