The aim of this paper is to provide a contribution to redefining the anthropological question
from the perspective of the two paramount members of the Southwest School of Neo-Kantianism:
Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband. To this purpose, following the lead of the
outcomes of Windelband’s philosophy of history and of Rickert’s philosophical anthropology,
the paper firstly proposes to identify the essential trait of the human being in its processual and
self-formative nature and, then, to assess the effectiveness and limitations of this thesis within the
current philosophical debate as radically redefined by the phenomena of posthumanism and
transhumanism. In this line of inquiry, the paper dwells principally on the redefinition, in heterological-
processual terms, of the relationship between the natural and cultural spheres of the
human being, as well as on the ethical-practical character that marks the process of human formation,
i.e. form-taking.
