Historical Names in the Study of Human Person Philosophy

What does it mean to study the human person philosophically – and why has the very name of that study changed so dramatically over the centuries? The terminology used to describe philosophical inquiry into human nature is far from neutral. Every label carries assumptions about what a human being is, how humans relate to other living things, and what makes human life significant. From the Latin-heavy scholastic terms of the medieval classroom to the more inclusive frameworks of modern thought, the evolution of these names tells a story of shifting worldviews, theological influences, and hard-won philosophical revisions.

The roots: studying the soul as the study of the human person 🔗

For much of Western philosophical history, studying the human person meant studying the soul. In the 18th century, “anthropology” broadly referred to the branch of philosophy that gave an account of human nature, but long before that label took hold, the study of humanity was embedded in what scholars called the scientia de anima – the science of the soul. This tradition drew heavily from Aristotle’s De Anima and was sustained through centuries of medieval scholastic commentary.

Aristotle defined the human being as a living substance that is the union of body and soul, where the soul was not something external to the body but the very principle that organizes, structures, and gives it life and form. For Aristotle, what distinguished humans from other animals was rationality – making the human person animal rationale, a rational animal. This view placed humans within a hierarchy of living beings: plants possessed a vegetative soul, animals an appetitive soul, and humans a rational soul that encompassed all previous levels.

Plato took an even more radical position. Plato identified human essence with the soul, treating the material body as a kind of prison from which the soul yearns to be liberated, drawn toward pure ideas and higher knowledge. This Platonic soul-body dualism would shape centuries of thinking about what made human beings superior to other living things.

Psychologia Superior and Psychologia Inferior: the hierarchical framework 🔗

The terms Psychologia Superior and Psychologia Inferior represent the clearest expression of a hierarchical philosophical worldview. Drawing on the Aristotelian and Christian inheritance, early modern thinkers used these categories to draw a firm boundary between the human person – understood as a being with a rational, immaterial soul – and all other forms of life, which were seen as operating on a lower, sub-rational level.

Psychologia Superior concerned itself with the higher faculties of the soul: reason, intellect, will, and the capacity for self-reflection and moral choice. These were faculties thought to be uniquely human, and indeed uniquely dignified. To study them was to study what elevated humans above the rest of nature. The Christian tradition reinforced this view significantly. Augustine of Hippo, for instance, saw the human being as a perfect unity of two substances – soul and body – affirming that the soul is superior to the body, a position grounded in a hierarchical classification of beings into those that merely exist, those that exist and live, and those that exist, live, and possess intelligence or reason.

Psychologia Inferior, by contrast, addressed the lower faculties – sensation, appetite, and instinct – capacities shared with animals. The word “inferior” was not simply descriptive; it carried the clear implication that these capacities were of lesser philosophical and moral worth. The study of animals, plants, and other non-rational life forms operated under this umbrella, positioned firmly below the rational human soul in the order of significance.

This hierarchical language was not accidental. It reflected a worldview in which human beings occupied a special, God-given place in the cosmos – above nature, not fully within it.

Christian Wolff and the formal naming of psychology 🔗

The formal disciplinary structure that gave “psychology” its modern scaffolding came largely from the German philosopher Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Before Wolff, psychological topics had appeared in discussions related either to the tradition of the scientia de anima – largely consisting of commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima – or to medicine. It was Wolff who unified the whole field of psychological topics into a single science or discipline.

Wolff crystallized his framework with the introduction of the terms empirical psychology and rational psychology, which later formed the basis of his voluminous Psychologia empirica (1732) and Psychologia rationalis (1734). For Wolff, empirical psychology established principles through experience – the observation of the mind’s actual operations – while rational psychology examined whatever was knowable about the soul through reason alone, with empirical findings serving as the necessary touchstone and starting point.

Wolff’s framework was significant because it brought philosophical rigor and systematic method to the study of the human soul. His Psychologia Rationalis explored the essence and nature of the human soul through scientific methodology and rational inquiry, aiming to deepen the understanding of human nature and its relationship to a creator. Yet the framework still presupposed a sharp distinction between the human soul and the lower forms of life – it remained, in spirit, a descendant of the superior/inferior divide.

The problem with hierarchical terminology 🔗

The superior/inferior framework, however philosophically coherent within its own assumptions, carried a built-in problem: it loaded the study of the human person with theological and metaphysical presuppositions that not everyone shared. To call the study of human consciousness Psychologia Superior was already to assert that humans are elevated above other life forms by virtue of a soul – a claim that is not philosophically neutral but deeply contentious.

As the natural sciences developed through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, these presuppositions came under pressure. By the mid-1800s, many of the sciences that were once integrated with philosophy began to diverge as new methodologies and questions arose. The rise of Darwinian evolutionary theory meant that the sharp boundary between human beings and other animals could no longer be taken for granted. If humans evolved from earlier primates, what becomes of the claim that we possess a uniquely superior soul?

Philosophers and scholars began to recognize that terms like Psychologia Superior smuggled in a conclusion – human superiority – that should itself be a subject of inquiry, not a starting assumption. The terminology needed to change.

Towards “Philosophical Anthropology”: a broader, more neutral term 🔗

Despite the terminological changes that developed over time, philosophers who considered questions of human nature demonstrated substantial continuity in the types of issues they studied. What changed was the framing – and the framing mattered enormously.

The term Philosophical Anthropology began to replace the older soul-centered vocabulary. Philosophical anthropology is the philosophical discipline that inquires into the essence of human nature and the human condition, seeking to unify or critique philosophically the diverse scientific methods and humanistic approaches to answering the question of human nature. Crucially, it does not begin by assuming that humans possess a superior soul. It asks the question openly: what is a human being?

The formal establishment of philosophical anthropology as an independent discipline is credited to the German phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874-1928). Scheler’s philosophy encompassed ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, religion, the sociology of knowledge, and modern philosophical anthropology, which he founded. His landmark work Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Man’s Place in Nature, 1928) asked directly where human beings stand within the cosmos – not above it as a matter of divine decree, but within it, in need of philosophical examination.

Scheler’s approach was a significant departure from the soul-hierarchy tradition. Scheler defined the human being not so much as a “rational animal” (as had traditionally been the case since Aristotle) but essentially as a “loving being,” describing the personal being with a tripartite structure of lived body, soul, and spirit. This redefinition moved away from purely cognitive superiority as the marker of humanity.

Philosophical anthropology in Scheler’s time aimed at clarifying what is distinctively human in relation to other animals – but doing so through inquiry, not assumption. The question of human uniqueness became something to be argued for and examined rather than inherited from theological tradition.

The “Philosophy of Human Person”: inclusion without hierarchy 🔗

A further refinement of the terminology came with the phrase Philosophy of Human Person (or Philosophy of the Human Person). This label has become particularly prominent in academic and educational philosophy, especially in contexts informed by both the phenomenological tradition and contemporary ethics.

The shift from “Psychologia Superior” to “Philosophy of Human Person” is more than cosmetic. Philosophical anthropology is sometimes called the “philosophy of man,” and asks questions such as “What is a human being?” – but the more contemporary “Philosophy of Human Person” foregrounds the concept of personhood rather than species classification. It emphasizes interiority, dignity, and relational existence rather than the soul’s alleged superiority over animal life.

This terminology is deliberately neutral on the metaphysical questions that divided earlier thinkers. It does not assume a soul in the theological sense, nor does it presuppose human superiority over other beings. It simply takes the human person – in their fullness of experience, consciousness, embodiment, and social existence – as the object of philosophical reflection. Rather than approaching the human from the standpoint of pure “objectivity,” in which the person is considered as an “object” of rational thought, the person is approached subjectively, from the inside of particular experiences.

Why the terminological shift matters 🔗

It might be tempting to see this as merely a naming convention – a kind of philosophical rebranding. But the shift in language reflects genuine changes in how philosophers understand the relationship between human beings, other animals, and the natural world.

The older vocabulary – Superior and Inferior, rational and sub-rational – encoded a vertical relationship between humans and nature. The newer vocabulary – Philosophical Anthropology, Philosophy of Human Person – opens the possibility of understanding humans as part of a broader web of life rather than as rulers set apart from it. The American Anthropological Association has noted that racial and hierarchical categories distort our ideas about human differences, and a similar critique applies to philosophical frameworks that treat the soul-hierarchy as a self-evident truth.

Philosophical anthropology seeks to unify the several empirical investigations of human nature in an effort to understand individuals as both creatures of their environment and creators of their own values. That dual description – creatures and creators – captures the tension at the heart of the human person. We are shaped by nature and biology, yet we also stand apart from purely instinctual existence. The newer terminology holds that tension open for investigation, rather than resolving it prematurely through appeals to a superior soul.

The transition also has ethical weight. Once we stop treating the study of non-human life as inherently “inferior,” we are more likely to ask serious philosophical questions about the moral status of animals, ecological responsibility, and the limits of human dominion. Philosophical anthropology as a kind of thought, before it was founded as a distinct discipline in the 1920s, emerged as post-medieval thought striving for emancipation from Christian religion and Aristotelian tradition. That emancipation was not a rejection of everything those traditions offered – it was a clearing of the ground so that the question of the human person could be asked more freely and rigorously.

Continuity beneath the changing names 🔗

What is striking, despite all these terminological shifts, is how persistent the core questions have been. Whether the inquiry is called Psychologia Superior, Psychologia Rationalis, Philosophical Anthropology, or Philosophy of Human Person, philosophers across centuries have asked fundamentally the same things: What makes a human being distinctively human? What is the relationship between mind and body, between the individual and society, between human life and the rest of nature? Despite the terminological changes that developed over time, philosophers who considered questions of human nature demonstrated substantial continuity in the types of issues they studied.

The names changed because the assumptions embedded in the older names became philosophically unsustainable – not because the questions themselves were resolved. If anything, stripping away the hierarchical language has made the questions harder and more honest. When we can no longer assume that humans have a superior soul by definition, we are forced to actually argue for – or against – human uniqueness. That is, arguably, where philosophy should always have been.

What do you think? Does dropping the language of “superior” and “inferior” souls make the philosophical study of the human person more rigorous – or does it risk losing something important about what distinguishes human life? And if “Philosophy of Human Person” deliberately avoids presuppositions about the soul, can it still make meaningful claims about human dignity and moral worth?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophical-anthropology
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anthropology
3. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-74435-9_1
4. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2022.2077403
5. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wolff-christian/
6. https://www.amazon.com/Psychologia-Rationalis-Methodo-Scientifica-Pertractata/dp/1289582033
7. https://study.com/academy/lesson/philosophical-anthropology-overview-history-principles.html
8. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Philosophical_anthropology
9. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Scheler
10. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/max-scheler-on-human-exceptionalism-in-a-technocratic-society/
11. https://iep.utm.edu/philosophy-of-anthropology/