The Characters of Living Things

Abstract

Straus’s Vom Sinn der Sinne was published in 1935, Kurt Goldstein’s Der Aufbau des Organismus had been published the previous year, E. Minkowski’s Le Temps Vécu in 1933, Helmuth Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch in 1928. In the European literature of philosophical anthropology and, more broadly, of philosophical biology, all these works have exerted a profound influence. In particular, when one reads this literature, the phrase ‘das schöne Buch von E. Straus’ becomes almost a fixed epithet like ‘swift-foot Achilles’ or ‘the incomparable Mr. Newton’. Even Buytendijk, who takes issue with Straus’s theory of sensing, pays tribute to - and borrows a great deal from - particular Strausian themes.