Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Essays on Kant's Anthropology
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Historical Notes and Interpretive Questions about Kant's Lectures on Anthropology
- 3 Kant and the Problem of Human Nature
- 4 The Second Part of Morals
- 5 The Guiding Idea of Kant's Anthropology and the Vocation of the Human Being
- 6 Kantian Character and the Problem of a Science of Humanity
- 7 Beauty, Freedom, and Morality: Kant's Lectures on Anthropology and the Development of His Aesthetic Theory
- 8 Kant's Apology for Sensibility
- 9 Kant's “True Economy of Human Nature”: Rousseau, Count Verri, and the Problem of Happiness
- 10 Prudential Reason in Kant's Anthropology
6 - Kantian Character and the Problem of a Science of Humanity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Essays on Kant's Anthropology
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Historical Notes and Interpretive Questions about Kant's Lectures on Anthropology
- 3 Kant and the Problem of Human Nature
- 4 The Second Part of Morals
- 5 The Guiding Idea of Kant's Anthropology and the Vocation of the Human Being
- 6 Kantian Character and the Problem of a Science of Humanity
- 7 Beauty, Freedom, and Morality: Kant's Lectures on Anthropology and the Development of His Aesthetic Theory
- 8 Kant's Apology for Sensibility
- 9 Kant's “True Economy of Human Nature”: Rousseau, Count Verri, and the Problem of Happiness
- 10 Prudential Reason in Kant's Anthropology
Summary
In the year following Kant's announcement in his famous letter to Marcus Herz that he was ready to bring forth a critique of reason, Kant announced in a letter to Herz that he had just begun lectures on anthropology and thought to make “a proper academic discipline” out of them. It would take Kant nine years before he finally published the Critique of Pure Reason, but the lectures on anthropology went ahead as planned, and he continued his course on the topic each winter semester for the next twenty-four years. The impetus for Kant's letter concerned Herz's favorable review of the then just published work Anthropology for Physicians and Philosophers (Weltweise) by the popular Leipzig physician, Ernst Platner. Kant suggested that his own version of anthropology would be quite different from Platner's for two reasons.
First, rather than offer merely theoretical approaches to human affairs, he would offer one whose orientation would be toward those issues that directly affect people. As opposed to the kind of knowledge that is useful only for theorizing in the schools, his would be useful for practice in the world. Second, Kant's version of anthropology would give up “the subtle and … eternally futile investigation into the manner in which the organs of the body are connected to thoughts.” Kantian anthropology would remain purely a “doctrine of observation” without the admixture of metaphysics.
The first lectures confirm these initial intentions.
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- Essays on Kant's Anthropology , pp. 105 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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