ABSTRACT
Philosophical anthropology embraces all those disciplines which are concerned with exploring human existence as experience. Socrates always maintains and defends the ideal of an objective, absolute, universal truth. Buber's philosophical anthropology and the ethic based on it seems to subsist without the need for 'revelation' in the special religious sense of the term. Maslow demands attention to the nonlogical, the poetic, the mythic, the vague, the primary processes, the dream-like. This is not to demand irrationality, nor to attack science. The interpretations of scientific data are made by 'a process of spontaneous mental reorganisation uncontrolled by conscious effort'. In his Personal Knowledge Polanyi demonstrated that all knowledge is rooted in the participation of whole persons. Marx examined the way in which the qualities of life, and human beings, are turned into commodities by an industrial-capitalist society, generating an 'alienation' and even a loss of confidence in active powers of mind.
