The traditional view of the relationship between the moral theories of Aristotle and Kant is that the two were fundamentally opposed to each other. Kant not only radically rejected Aristotle's eudaimonism, but he was also opposed to virtue as a fundamental ethical category. From the Aristotelian point of view, it has been argued that Kant's formalism and rigorism, his emphasis on pure rationality and eternal or unchangeable law, leaves no room for human flourishing of the sort that Aristotle had in mind. More recently, there have been several attempts to show that the opposition between Kantian and Aristotelian moral theory is neither as radical nor as important as traditionally thought. I would like, in this essay, to try to defend important aspects of the traditional theory. There is, I will argue, a fundamental difference between Aristotelian approaches and Kant's own view. Furthermore, I will suggest that the attempts to minimize the differences give up some of the deepest aspirations of Kantian idealism.

This is not to deny that the Aristotle–Kant relation is sufficiently complex to make it impossible to do complete justice to it in a relatively short essay like this one. I will therefore limit myself to two of the themes that I consider most important. These are Kant's view of the problem of eudaimonism and egoism and its relation to Aristotle; and the similarities and differences between Aristotle's and Kant's virtues. To this end, I first analyze Kant's explicit statements about Aristotelian ethics and show that Kant, at the very least, did not consider himself as an Aristotelian, but thought that he had provided a radical alternative to it (section iii). Secondly, I discuss some of the attempts to make Kant's moral theory compatible with eudaimonsim of some sort (section iv). Thirdly (section v), I attempt to disentangle Kant's various statements about virtue and attempt to situate his moral thought more precisely within the tradition of the history of virtue ethics. This is followed by a short evaluation of what I take to be the significance of my findings.

Some philosophical scholars understand the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim of 1784 as Kant's most explicit formulation of his “philosophy of history.” Put differently, they understand this essay as his attempt to uncover the fundamental laws of the historical development of humanity, similar in intent to the efforts of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and others, who offered compelling accounts of what they took to be the meaning and direction of history. But there are many reasons why such an interpretation should be rejected. The English word “history” is just as ambiguous as the German word “Geschichte.” It can refer either to the totality of events that we call “history” or to the way in which history is conceived or written. In the latter sense, we also speak of “historiography” (“Geschichtsschreibung”), and use the terms “history” (Geschichte) as a mere shorthand for the former. The Universal History presents and defends an “idea” and a “point of view” for the writing of such a universal or world history. In other words, Kant was addressing in this essay Geschichtsschreibung or historiography, advocating and giving reasons for a certain way of writing history from a philosophical point of view that introduces a “plan” or a “purpose of nature” into the historical account we give of human events. He claimed that such a plan must concern the progress of human abilities toward their full development or perfection.

The origins of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

Anthropology as understood today is a discipline concerned with the study of the physical, cultural, social, and linguistic development of human beings from prehistoric times to the present. It is a relatively new phenomenon, which came into its own only during the early nineteenth century. Its roots, however, can be traced back to the last third of the eighteenth century. Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Condorcet in France, Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, and William Robertson in Scotland, and Immanuel Kant, Georg Forster, Christoph Meiners, and Ernst Platner in Germany were among the most important early contributors to this new field of study. It grew ultimately from a fundamental concern of the European Enlightenment, being conceived as an alternative to the theological understanding of the nature of man and born of the belief that the proper study of mankind is man, not God.

Kant fully subscribed to this Enlightenment conception, even though, as we shall also see, he did not want to deny that theological concerns were very important for the proper understanding of human nature. He was, in any case, one of the first thinkers ever to lecture on anthropology as an independent academic discipline at university level. Though the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published at the end of the eighteenth century in 1798, he had by then already lectured on it for twenty-five years.