Viktoria Bachmann

Viktoria Bachmann is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy in Kiel. Her research focuses on ancient philosophy (especially the pre-Socratics and Plato), ethics and philosophical anthropology. She received her doctorate in 2012 with a thesis on the reason for the good life at the Free University of Berlin and habilitated in Kiel in 2023.

Abstract: The project examines the Platonic understanding of the human being, including the pre-Socratic and Sophistic theorems. The background to this is the widespread view that Plato marks the beginning of a problematic tradition of dualistic anthropology which, in conjunction with Christianity, determines Western thought. Research has increasingly shown this view of Platonic anthropology to be under-complex. The dualism between mind and matter was already introduced by some pre-Socratics and is not the only perspective on human beings in the Platonic works. The aim of the research project is to reconstruct the early Greek anthropologems up to Plato in their systematic context.

The research project is based on Plato's concept of human being as an erotic deficient being (Mängelwesen), which is particularly comprehensible in the Symposium. An erotic being is not characterised by a separation of the sensual and spiritual spheres and a rejection of this worldly life, but rather by an effort to unite the spheres of the human being through the realisation of the spiritual in this life. Of outstanding importance here is the concept of the transformation of the human being in the ascent to the Good, since in this way one can transcend one’s factual existence towards a good existence.

As a result of my research, the implicit anthropology of the natural philosophers can be described as an anthropology of continuity, that of the Sophists as an anthropology of ambivalence, and that of the Socratic-Platonic as an anthropology of transcendence.