Kant is sometimes thought to be a thoroughly ahistorical philosopher. Allen Wood points out, however, that those who think of Kant in this way “have a profoundly false image of the critical philosophy” (Wood 1999: 208). Although Kant considers reason to be a faculty with unchanging principles, he holds that our awareness of the rational principles of right and morality is historically conditioned and also that “our use of reason develops through history” (ibid.: 230, 248).

The key text for understanding Kant's philosophy of history is his essay Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784). In that essay Kant claims that history proceeds “in accordance with a determinate plan of nature” (UH 109). This claim itself presupposes that there is “purposiveness” [Zweckmäßigkeit] in the arrangement of nature as a whole (UH 115 [8:25]). Kant's philosophy of history thus forms part of his “teleological doctrine of nature” (UH 109).

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) Kant maintains that the concept of “the purposiveness of nature … has its origin strictly in the reflecting power of judgment” (CJ 68). In particular, such judgement presupposes that nature's universal empirical laws are purposefully suited to our understanding of them (CJ 72). Kant also claims, however, that the concept of an objective purposiveness of nature – the idea that nature does not just accommodate our aim of understanding it but has purposes or “ends” of its own – is “a critical principle of reason [Vernunft] for the reflecting power of judgment”, rather than a principle of reflecting judgement itself (CJ 268 [5:397]; see also CJ 274).