Of a Mythical Philosophical Anthropology: the Transcendental and the Empirical in Technics and Time

Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus is a reinvention of philosophical anthropology. The book’s central thesis is that man never exists without technics, and this means that any transcendental account of man’s emergence must implicate an empirical account of the emergence of technology. These two accounts together comprise a philosophical anthropology, but Stiegler shows that such an anthropology can only take the form of a myth – and it is in this that Stiegler’s ‘reinvention’ consists.