Plessner pioneered a social-historical strain of philosophical anthropology and survived the occupation underground

Evidence

Plessner, three years older than Horkheimer, had lost his job as a teacher of philosophy in Cologne in 1933 because he was Jewish, and he emigrated to the Netherlands in 1934. In 1939 he became the first professor of sociology at a Dutch state university, with an endowed chair at the University of Groningen. He survived the German invasion in the underground, and finally, at the age of sixty, was appointed to a new chair for sociology and philosophy at Göttingen. With his book on The Stages of Organic Life and Man, published in 1928, Plessner had become, alongside Scheler, one of the founders of modern philosophical anthropology. Unlike Scheler, he carried out his analyses from the point of view of social history. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1960

Categorization

• XREF: Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and Scheler’s connect to broader Critical Theory lineages that Wiggershaus traces; useful reference detail for the institutional history.