Barcelona convenes a congress on the image-making animal, in the year of the image machines

The Hispanic Society of Philosophical Anthropology holds its sixteenth international congress at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Carrer de la Immaculada 22, in the hills above Barcelona, from 30 September to 2 October. The theme is Homo pictor: Art, Imagination and Creation. Eight keynote speakers are billed, the call for papers closed on 15 May, and registration ran for one month from 15 June. A member of the society pays thirty euros; a non-member giving a paper paid seventy-five.

Read the title quickly and it looks like a congress on aesthetics. The call for papers says something narrower. Fifteen thematic lines are set out, seven general and eight specific, and the specific ones run from the anthropological roots of artistic activity through art and health, art and the ecological crisis, gesture and expressivity, image and imaginary, to a last heading that the organisers phrase as the obsolescence of creativity and new technologies. Obsolescence is a considerably stronger word than impact. It is also, three years into the industrial production of pictures by machine, a word that someone chose deliberately.

So the proposition on the table in Barcelona is that the human being is the animal that makes images — and that this, rather than tool use or language or laughter, is what marks the species off. Philosophers have been arguing about that proposition since 1961. This is the first congress to argue about it in a year when making an image costs nothing.

The term belongs to Hans Jonas, and the date of it does the work#

Jonas published "Homo pictor und die differentia des Menschen" in the Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung in 1961, in volume 15, issue 2, at pages 161 to 176. An English version, "Homo Pictor and the Differentia of Man", appeared in Social Research the following year, volume 29, pages 201 to 220. The Spanish organisers credit Jonas by name in their own publicity, which is worth recording, because the phrase now circulates in art-historical and museum writing as though it had no author and had always been there.

His argument was against the tool. Defining the human by what it makes to use had been the standard move since the nineteenth century, and Jonas thought it caught the wrong thing, because much of tool-making is continuous with what other animals do with sticks and stones. The image is continuous with nothing. To put a bison on a cave wall is to take a form away from the animal that has it and set it down again in pigment on rock, where it feeds nobody. Jonas's claim was that the capacity to do that — to separate an eidos from its bearer and re-embody it deliberately in something else — is a genuine break, and that a creature capable of it is already capable of everything else we call human. He set the picture-maker alongside Ernst Cassirer's animal symbolicum rather than in opposition to it; the two accounts are cousins.

Hans Blumenberg is often invoked at this point, and the attribution slips. His philosophical anthropology, worked out under Arnold Gehlen's influence and published in full only after his death in 1996, shares the preoccupations exactly: the cave, the picture, the creature that cannot bear reality without something interposed between itself and reality. Höhlenausgänge, of 1989, spends a very long book at the mouth of Plato's cave. But the coinage is Jonas's, and it is twenty-eight years older.

None of which means Jonas would recognise the use Barcelona is putting him to. He was writing about cave painting and about the metaphysics of resemblance, in a decade when the only machine that made pictures was a camera and nobody thought the camera had imagined anything. Whether an argument built on that assumption survives contact with a system trained on billions of pictures is precisely what the eighth specific strand exists to find out.

Philosophical anthropology is a discipline in Spanish, German and Italian, and hardly a word in English#

Ask a philosophy graduate in Manchester or Ann Arbor what philosophical anthropology is, and the two commonest answers are that it must be social anthropology done by philosophers, or that it is the young Marx on species-being. Neither is right. The subject is the attempt to make "what is a human being?" a first-order philosophical question, with its own literature and its own methods, instead of a heading under which philosophy of mind, ethics, philosophy of biology and social theory each quietly take a slice and go home.

Its founding texts are German: Max Scheler's Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928), Helmuth Plessner's Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928), Arnold Gehlen's Der Mensch (1940). From there the tradition travelled south and west rather than across the Channel. Spain, Portugal, Latin America, Italy and the German-speaking universities have chairs, journals, societies and biennial congresses in the subject. Britain and North America have none of these under that name.

Three reasons are usually given, all partly true. The analytic settlement of the mid-century broke the question into pieces and distributed them, so that nobody in an anglophone department has professional cause to ask it whole. Gehlen's conduct under National Socialism poisoned the well for a generation of readers. And the translations arrived absurdly late. Plessner's Stufen, the most systematic book the tradition produced, waited ninety-one years for an English edition: Fordham published it as Levels of Organic Life and the Human, translated by Millay Hyatt with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein, on 2 July 2019. Merleau-Ponty, Berger and Habermas had all worked from it in the interval. Anglophone readers had a summary.

The Spanish institutional record is unusually easy to date, because the society keeps its minutes online. The Sociedad Hispánica de Antropología Filosófica was constituted at half past four in the afternoon on 13 September 1996 in Madrid, during the second national congress of philosophical anthropology, and the founding act carries four signatures: Jacinto Choza Armenta of Seville, Montserrat Negre Rigol, Gemma Vicente Arregui, and Jorge Vicente Arregi of Málaga. The congresses have run every two years since — Barcelona in 1998, when they went international, then Valencia, Santiago, Málaga, Seville, Madrid, Teruel, Alicante, Castellón, Zaragoza and Valladolid in 2018 — with a single gap where the pandemic was, before Madrid in 2022 and Valencia in 2024. Thirty years, fifteen meetings, one interruption. Few philosophical subfields in any language can show that.

The honest qualification is that the anglophone world does ask the questions, under other names and with other manners. Elizabeth Anscombe on intention, Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, John McDowell's Mind and World, Martha Nussbaum's capabilities: these are philosophical anthropology by any reasonable description. What is missing is not the thought but the furniture — no society, no congress, no seat on a syllabus, and so no place where the pieces are made to talk to each other. Barcelona has the furniture and will use it.

What the programme actually asks#

The keynotes come from seven universities and four countries: César Moreno Márquez (Seville), Magda Polo Pujadas (Barcelona), Ignasi Roviró i Alemany (Ramon Llull), Roland Breeur (Leuven), Joaquín Esteban (Valladolid), María Teresa Russo (Roma Tre), Fernando Pérez Borbujo (Pompeu Fabra) and Irene Borges-Duarte (Évora). Papers were accepted in Spanish and the other languages of Spain, and in English, French, Italian and Portuguese. Not German, which for a discipline invented in Weimar Germany is a small irony, and a fair measure of where the centre of gravity has moved.

Three of the specific strands are worth flagging for readers who will not be in the room. Art, creativity and health takes the question into medicine and care, which follows on from the society's last congress, held in Valencia in 2024 on the contemporary relation to the end of life. Art, creativity and the ecological crisis asks what image-making is for on a damaged planet. And the last strand, on obsolescence and new technologies, is the one carrying the year's argument: if the differentia of the human was the capacity to make pictures, and the picture-making has been automated, then either the differentia was wrong or it was never about the output. Jonas's own text suggests the second answer. The congress will presumably test whether it holds.

The rest of the late-autumn calendar#

Our round-up of the autumn conference season carried the metaphysics and Hegel meetings. Four more have since been confirmed, one of which starts as this piece appears.

Beyond Labels: Disability, Different Ability and Neurodiversity runs on 12 and 13 September at Birkbeck, University of London, organised by the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. It is hybrid; attendance costs £150 in person and £90 online. The framing is wide — disability as a social construct, representation in the arts and media, neurodiversity in schools, assistive technology, the intersections with race and gender — and philosophers will be a minority among sociologists, educationists and practitioners. That is usually a good sign for a conference of this kind and a bad one for anyone hoping to hear a technical paper.

Philosophy of Science and Ethics of Science in the Context of A. Schopenhauer is at the Zentrum für Wissenschaftstheorie of the University of Münster on 30 November and 1 December, in the Schloss, with the Schopenhauer Society. Sessions are in German and English. The list of speakers includes Dieter Birnbacher, Marco Segala, Claudia Bozzaro, Javier Legris, Ingolf Max, Jacob Rosenthal and Laura Langone, and the brief runs from general philosophy of science through Schopenhauer on evolution, physics and mathematics to animal and environmental ethics — a reminder that the philosopher of pessimism was also a close and combative reader of the sciences of his day.

The 25th Amsterdam Colloquium meets from 16 to 18 December at the University of Amsterdam, hosted by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. This is the fiftieth-anniversary edition of a meeting that has been the standing address for formal semantics since 1976. The invited speakers are Ira Noveck (CNRS), Sophie Repp (Cologne), Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth) and Michael Franke (Tübingen); there is a workshop on semantics and non-classical logics with Lorenzo Rossi (Turin), a Beth Lecture from Nicholas Asher (CNRS), and an anniversary session called "The Past and Future of Semantics" with Barbara Partee, Ivano Caponigro, Hans Kamp and Thomas Ede Zimmermann. Partee's presence is the point of that panel: she was there at the beginning.

Barcelona and Amsterdam will not cite each other, and the people in the two rooms would find each other's papers unreadable. They are working the same seam from opposite ends: what it takes for a mark on a surface to stand for an absent bison, and what it takes for a string of words to stand for a state of the world. Both questions acquired a new interlocutor in the last three years, and neither field has yet decided whether to answer it.