THINKING THE FAMILY. SOME LINES IN 20TH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY
THINKING THE FAMILY. SOME LINES IN 20TH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

Summary/Abstract: Modern times are in many ways not a beginning, but an end. So also as to community and family. Modern times are not original, but secondary, derivative. Therefore, in order to understand them, we have to see their derivativeness first. This is developed with the help of a number of texts by Alasdair MacIntyre and Hans Sedlmayr. Then: In order to regain within the strange surrounding ´20th century` the old strength of community- and family-thinking we have to concentrate on a robust understanding of institutions. Here Arnold Gehlen, especially with his radically underestimated book Urmensch und Spätkultur, is proposed as enormously helpful for an understanding of the binding force of institutions. Finally, there are starting-points for thinking the family, perhaps even more than this, in several lines of philosophy of the 20th century; some forms are distinguished in an effort at a typology, using books and thoughts of authors like among others C.S. Lewis, Robert Spaemann, and Martin Heidegger.

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