The philosophical anthropology of Edward Shils

The work of Edward Shils is replete with a number of rich anthropological insights that amount to a philosophy of life. His analysis of the different, heterogeneous orientations of the human mind, and the implications of that analysis, represent a philosophical anthropology. It may be that the most productive way to understand the wide-ranging corpus of his writings, including his understanding of the calling of sociology and the purpose of the university, is to approach them from the perspective of the principled pluralism of his philosophical anthropology.