EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In 1785 the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) published his last work to appear during his lifetime, Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes (Morning Hours or Lectures on the Existence of God). As Mendelssohn himself conceded in the Preface, the work was written in virtual ignorance of the recent writings in metaphysics, including the critique of traditional metaphysics by the “all-crushing Kant” (des alles zermalmendenen Kant). Mendelssohn's apparently anachronistic attempt at a demonstration of the existence of a personal God by rational means belongs into the specific context of an intellectual dispute that shook the German lands in the 1780s.

In 1783 the writer and philosopher, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), had stated in a communication to Mendelssohn, which he made public in 1785, that the writer and philosopher, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), had confessed to Jacobi toward the end of his life to not being able to believe in a personal God any longer and to have become a pantheist or Spinozist. Jacobi considered Lessing's confession as evidence of the impossibility to safeguard the belief in a personal God by rational means and sought support for his own theistic religious convictions in a leap of faith that defied reason. Confronted with the dilemma of Lessing's alleged pantheistic atheism and Jacobi's professed irrationalist fideism, Mendelssohn retreated in Morning Hours to the very position of a rationalist theism that had been rendered obsolete by Kant's principal limitation of valid theoretical cognition to objects of sense and specifically by his systematic refutation of the traditional rationalist arguments for the existence of a personal God.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) had been Kant's student in Königsberg between 1762 and 1765, but was well known during the 1770s as a critic of the Enlightenment. In 1784 he produced the first volume of his greatest work, Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity. Kant reviewed the first two volumes, containing books 1 through 10, for the Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung in the January and November issues of 1785.

Book 10 of Herder's Ideas contained an account of the earliest ages of human history. It was based on a creative interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis, and was designed to drive home some central points in Herder's critique of the Enlightenment. Herder sees human beings as destined by God for a life of innocent contentment, and originally as standing in natural harmony with the divine, whose spirit is expressed through all folk cultures, poetry and religion. He views the Fall as the self-assertion of human reason, which corrupts human life and brings misery on human beings when it claims an authority over human life that is detached from our larger humanity and made independent of these supernatural resources of revealed knowledge.

Herder's first expression of these ideas had come in his Oldest Document of Humankind (1774), to which Kant had reacted quite negatively, and expressed in letters to J. G. Hamann (who had also been Herder's mentor).

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

Occasioned by the reception of his earlier essay, Of the Different Races of Human Beings (1775, 2nd edn. 1777), which is also contained in the present volume, Kant's second essay on the natural history of the human species, entitled Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace (Determination of the Concept of a Human Race), appeared in November 1785 in issue no. 11 of the Berlinische Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly), pp. 390–417. While Kant's earlier essay had addressed the unity of the human species and its differentiation into subspecies (“races”) in a fairly detailed geographical context, his second essay on the same topics focuses on conceptual issues and stresses that the elucidation of a concept such as that of a human race cannot be based on observation alone but needs to be guided by a preliminary determination of what to look for.

Kant's methodological clarification and the corresponding alternative presentation of his earlier account of the natural history of the human species in the second essay seek to redress the one-sided reception of the first essay, which had concentrated exclusively on Kant's hypothetical account of the actual differentiation of the human species over time and space and neglected to pay attention to his chief philosophical concern with developing the very concept of a subspecies – as possessing physical characteristics that are passed on unfailingly both within one and the same subspecies and across different subspecies.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

After Of the Different Races of Human Beings (1775; 2nd edn 1777) and Determination of the Concept of a Human Race (1785), both of which are contained in the present volume, Kant published his third and final essay on the natural history of the human species, entitled Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie, in January and February of 1788 in the Teutscher Merkur (German Mercury), issues nos. 1 and 2 (1st quartal, pp. 36–52 and pp. 107–36). The immediate occasion was the publication of an essay in the same journal in two installments in the fall of the previous year (October 1786, pp. 57–86 and November 1786, pp. 150–66), entitled Noch etwas über die Menschenracen. An Herrn Dr. Biester (Something Further on the Human Races. To Dr. Biester). The author of the critical essay was Georg Forster (1754–94), who had accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, on Captain James Cook's second voyage around the world in 1772–5, later assumed a professorship in natural history in Vilnius, Lithuania (at the time part of the Russian Empire) and who had moved to Mainz, Germany, in late 1788, where he was to turn into a fervent supporter of the French revolution. Forster's essay contained objections to Kant's concept of a human race, along with a mention of and two passing references to Kant's slightly earlier essay, Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786), which had also appeared in the Teutscher Merkur and which is also contained in the present volume.

The present volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation contains seventeen works by Kant published over a thirty-nine-year period, including Kant's most popular early work, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), the last work Kant himself saw to publication, Postscript to Christian Gottlieb Mielcke's Lithuanian–German and German–Lithuanian Dictionary (1800), and the last work edited on Kant's behalf during his lifetime, Lectures on Pedagogy (1803). The volume contains all of Kant's published works in cultural and physical anthropology, in the philosophy of history and in the philosophy of education. The works vary in character and length from short reviews of the works of others and postscripts to the works of others through extensive essays published in leading journals of the time to book-length studies that codify Kant's considered views in a larger area of philosophy.

The philosophical center of the present volume is occupied by Kant's two works in the philosophy of history, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784) and Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786), and by Kant's book publication of his lectures on anthropology, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). This core is supplemented by Kant's three sequentially conceived contributions to the contemporary debate about the unity of the human species and its division into races, Of the Different Races of Human Beings (1775), Determination of the Concept of a Human Race (1785), and On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (1788); by a number of smaller works on physical and cultural specifics of the human being, and by Kant's two work groups in the philosophy of education, Essays Regarding the Philanthropinum (1776/7) and Lectures on Pedagogy.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

Kant's little book Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime was submitted to the Dean of the University of Königsberg for approval of publication on October 8, 1763, and its first edition was published in Königsberg by Johann Jacob Kanter with the date of 1764. Kant's then friend Johann Georg Hamann reported on February 1, 1764 that he was at work on a review of the work (which would appear in the Königsberger gelehrte und politische Zeitungen on April 30, 1764), so the work was actually published no later than January, 1764.

The book was thus written at the end of the period of exceptional productivity in which Kant had composed The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762), the Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (also 1762, although not published until 1764, when it was published by the Berlin Academy of Sciences as the runner-up to Moses Mendelssohn's essay On Evidence in the Metaphysical Sciences, which was awarded the first prize in the Academy's 1762 competition on the question of whether philosophy could employ the mathematical method), the Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), and the Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763).

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The Latin original of On the Philosophers' Medicine of the Body was in all likelihood delivered by Kant as a public oration on the occasion of the end of his first term as Rector of the University of Königsberg on 1 October 1786. Kant's learned speech places the relation between mind and body in the disciplinary and institutional context of the relation between medicine and philosophy. For Kant, mind and body influence each other both in health and in sickness. Accordingly, Kant assigns a philosophical function to the physician and a medical function to the philosopher: in treating the body, medicine is also able to relieve mental ills; and in teaching and practising the mastery of the body through the mind, philosophy may also achieve the healing of a sick body.

Kant's speech is remarkable for its concern with the bodily causes of mental illnesses. In passing, Kant addresses the much-discussed demise of the philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, who had died earlier the same year. Mendelssohn had been involved in an acrimonious literary dispute with the writer and philosopher, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, over the latter's public charge that their common friend, the writer and philosopher, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, had confessed to not believing in a personal God. Rather than siding with those contemporaries who made Jacobi's conduct responsible for Mendelssohn's death, Kant attributes it to malnutrition caused by Mendelssohn's excessive asceticism.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The Königsbergische Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen (Königsberg Learned and Political Newspaper) of 23 August 1771 (issue No. 67, pp. 265f.) contained an anonymous review of the German translation of a booklet by the Italian physician and anatomist, Pietro Moscati (1739–1824), professor of anatomy at the University of Pavia, entitled Von dem körperlichen wesentlichen Unterschiede zwischen der Struktur der Thiere und Menschen. Eine akademische Rede, gehalten auf dem anatomischen Theater zu Pavia (Of the Corporeal Essential Differences Between the Structure of Animals and Humans. An Academic Oration Held in the Anatomical Theater of Pavia). The Italian original had appeared in 1770 in Milan under the title Delle corporee differenze essenziali che passano fra la struttura de' bruti e la umana. A second edition, containing an appendix in which Moscati replied to his critics, came out in Brescia in 1771. The German translation was by Johann Beckmann (1738–1811), professor of philosophy and later of economics at the University of Göttingen.

Kant's authorship the review of Moscati's work has been established circumstantially. The review states Moscati's main thesis that the erect position in the human being is artificial and unnatural and enumerates the evidence cited by Moscati for his thesis. In concluding, the reviewer distinguishes between the animal nature of the human being, which is geared toward self-preservation and the preservation of the species and includes the four-legged position, and the rational nature of the human being, which is geared toward society and elicits the two-legged position.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In late 1763 and early 1764 a Polish religious fanatic by the name of Jan Pawlikowicz Zdomozyrskich Komarnicki, who traveled in the company of a little boy and a herd of cows, sheep, and goats, took his sojourn outside of Königsberg and attracted widespread attention. After a serious illness and a visionary experience provoked by twenty days of fasting, the “goat prophet,” as he became known in Königsberg, had vowed to undertake a seven-year pilgrimage, of which two years remained to be served at that time. Kant's former student and friend, Johann Georg Hamann, published a report about Komarnicki in the Königsbergische Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen (Königsberg Learned and Political Newspaper), of which he was the editor (issue No. 3 of 1764). The report referred to the “goat prophet” as an “adventurer” (Abenteurer) and gave a critical portrayal of the man's religious comportment Hamann’s report was followed by an anonymous assessment: “According to the judgment of a local scholar, the most remarkable thing in the above note about the inspired faun and his lad, for such eyes as gladly spy out raw nature, which commonly becomes very unrecognizable under the discipline to which human beings are subjected, is – the little wild one, who grew up in the woods, has learned to bid defiance to all hardships of weather with a joyful liveliness and whose face displays no vulgar frankness and has nothing about it of the stupid embarrassment which is an effect result of servitude or of the forced attentiveness in finer education; and, to be brief, who seems to be (when one takes away that in which a few people have already corrupted him, by teaching him to ask for money and to enjoy sweets), a perfect child in that understanding in which an experimental moralist could wish it, one who would be reasonable enough not to count the words of Herr Rousseau among the beautiful phantoms until he had tested them..

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

Beginning with the summer semester of 1756, which was only his second semester of academic teaching, Kant regularly lectured on physical geography, thereby introducing this subject matter into the curriculum at the University of Königsberg. He offered the course some forty-eight times and, after adding a regular course on anthropology, which was also an academic novelty, beginning with the winter semester 1772/73, alternated between the two courses, lecturing on anthropology during the winter and on physical geography during the summer term. The two-part sequence of courses was designed to give Kant's students useful orientation about the two main fields of knowledge that have an immediate application outside of academia in life, the human being and nature. The course on physical geography was unusual in that Kant did not base it on an official textbook, as was generally required at Prussian universities at the time, but on his own collection of materials to which he added over the years.

On five separate occasions Kant published announcements of his lecture activity for a given semester in the form of a small scholarly essay of wider interest, followed by details about his courses and also including mention or description of his course on physical geography. The last of these invitational writings, dating from the summer semester of 1775, is entitled, Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen zur Ankündigung der Vorlesungen der physischen Geographie im Sommerhalbenjahre 1775 von Immanuel Kant der Log. und Met. ordentl. Prof.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

In a letter written toward the end of 1773 to his former student Marcus Herz, Kant notes:

Kant taught his anthropology course twenty-four times – every winter semester from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. A companion course in physical geography (which he had first offered in 1756, and out of which the anthropology course to some extent grew) was offered in the summer semesters.

Within a few years of the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the seminal philosophers of modern times – indeed as one of the great philosophers of all time. This renown soon spread beyond German-speaking lands, and translations of Kant's work into English were published even before 1800. Since then, interpretations of Kant's views have come and gone and loyalty to his positions has waxed and waned, but his importance has not diminished. Generations of scholars have devoted their efforts to producing reliable translations of Kant into English as well as into other languages.

There are four main reasons for the present edition of Kant's writings:

1. Completeness. Although most of the works published in Kant's life- time have been translated before, the most important ones more than once, only fragments of Kant's many important unpublished works have ever been translated. These include the Opus postumum, Kant's unfinished magnum opus on the transition from philosophy to physics; transcriptions of his classroom lectures; his correspondence; and his marginalia and other notes. One aim of this edition is to make a comprehensive sampling of these materials available in English for the first time.

2. Availability. Many English translations of Kant's works, especially those that have not individually played a large role in the subsequent development of philosophy, have long been inaccessible or out of print. Many of them, however, are crucial for the understanding of Kant's philosophical development, and the absence of some from English-language bibliographies may be responsible for erroneous or blinkered traditional interpretations of his doctrines by English-speaking philosophers.

3. […]