This article presents and compares aspects of Charles Taylor's and Hans Blumenberg's seemingly opposing views about agency and epistemology, setting them in the context of the tradition in German ideas called philosophical anthropology', with which both align their thinking. It presents key strands of this tradition, from their inception in the late eighteenth century in the writings of Herder, Schiller and others associated with anthropology to their articulation by thinkers such as Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen and Karl Lowith in the early twentieth century. The main issues here are: man's status as part of nature or as radically divorced' from nature; the possibility of objective knowledge of man versus the epistemological status of human meaning'; the view of knowledge as abstraction versus concrete' or lived' experience. Within these parameters the article contrasts Taylor's emphasis on engaged' agency, embedded in discourses, bodies and predispositions, with Blumenberg's sense of our indirect' relation to reality: delayed, selective, and above all metaphorical'. It concludes that each position may be traced back to a key strand in philosophical anthropology: the one emphasising man's unique freedom, the other that sees man's grasp of reality as uniquely interwoven with a background of meanings.
