Abstract

Forty years after his death, the work of Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann still presents a challenge to several disciplines. A brief indication of the significance and complexity of his legacy is the fact that this zoologist, long regarded as a specialist on several species of marine fauna and on the embryonic development of vertebrates, achieved fame with a book about the special position of humans in the animal kingdom and thus became one of the founding figures of philosophical anthropology. In contrast, the culmination of his zoological research – a project to reform morphology based on the display of living beings, on the idea that “appearing” belongs to the basic function of living forms and is just as fundamental as preservation of the individual or the species – attracted the attention of philosophers and aestheticians but did not make a large impact on his fellow zoologists. The causes of this differential and somewhat contradictory reception are not primarily rooted in Portmann’s work itself, as its creator did not see a radical divide between the individual areas of his research. Furthermore, he formulated the basic principles of both his anthropology and his phenomenal biology roughly at the same time, in the early 1940s.