Philosophical anthropology emerged as an internal subdiscipline of philosophy that aimed to systematize the efforts for answering the question about what the human being is. Within it, the level of self-consciousness that this question evokes is beyond doubt. Philosophical anthropology is not merely an intellectual way of grasping the human being, but thinking about the human being par excellence. Nonetheless, what is the structural specificity that this philosophical orbit offers? This article intends to reconstruct the conceptual core that philosophical anthropology developed, from its first outlines in Kant until its systematic realization in Scheler, Plessner and Gehlen. In that regard, it will be possible to verify a two-dimensional structure which is rooted in two distant but deeply-linked poles: nature and culture.