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
1 - Introduction
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
No other issue in Kant's thought is as pervasive and persistent as that of human nature. Posed as the peculiarly Kantian question, “what is the human being?” (Was ist der Mensch?), this may be the sole concern that appears consistently from Kant's earliest writings through the last. In Kant's lectures – on logic, metaphysics, ethics, and education – it is difficult to find a text completely free of anthropological observation. Reaching far beyond considerations of ethics and history, moreover, the question of human nature is also present in Kant's most “scientific” reflections. In the conclusion of Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens from 1755, a text principally dedicated to applying Newton's theory of attraction and repulsion toward understanding the emergence of the heavens, Kant closes with this comment:
It is not even properly known to us what the human being truly is now, although consciousness and the senses ought to instruct us of this; how much less will we be able to guess what he one day ought to become. Nevertheless, the human soul's desire for knowledge (Wiβbegierde) snaps very desirously (begierig) at this object that lies so far from it and strives, in such obscure knowledge, to shed some light.
The “critical” project that would take shape some twenty years later is partly an extension of this very concern.
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- Information
- Essays on Kant's Anthropology , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003