The present volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation differs from all of the other volumes in the series in that it is not devoted solely to one major work of Kant (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of the Power of Judgment), does not focus on writings from a specific period of his writing career (e.g., Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–70; Opus postumum), is not confined to one specific subfield or area of his philosophy (e.g., Practical Philosophy, Religion and Rational Theology), and does not focus on a distinct genre of writing or mode of presentation (e.g., Correspondence, Lectures on Metaphysics, Lectures on Ethics). At the same time, Anthropology, History, and Education is no mere miscellany of occasional pieces that stands awkwardly outside of Kant's central philosophical concerns. Rather, these writings (whose original publication dates span thirty-nine years of Kant's life) are linked together by their central focus on human nature – the most pervasive and persistent theme in all of Kant's writings. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question “What is the human being?” should be philosophy's most fundamental concern (Jäsche Logic 9: 25; cf. letter to Stäudlin of May 4, 1793, 11: 429, Metaphysik Pölitz 28: 533–4), and over the years he approached the question from a variety of different perspectives. In addition to addressing this question indirectly under the guises of metaphysics, moral philosophy, and philosophy of religion, Kant broached the question directly in his extensive work on anthropology, history, and education gathered in the present volume.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was Kant's student in Königsberg between 1762 and 1765, but he had also come under the influence of Kant's eccentric friend Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), whose views on reason, religion and society were deeply opposed to Kant's Enlightenment principles. During the 1770s, Herder rose to prominence as a critic of the Enlightenment, and in 1784 he produced the first volume of his greatest work, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity. Kant was invited to review the work by Christian Gottfried Schütz, editor of the Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung (published in Jena and Leipzig).

The first of Kant's reviews, presented here under the heading ‘I.’, appeared in January, 1785. It quotes extensively from Herder (though the quotations are often mere paraphrases, and do not even always accurately reflect what Herder said). Kant's chief criticisms of Herder in this first review are directed at Herder's attempt to derive all human characteristics from the upright posture of the human body and at Herder's attempt to argue for the spirituality and consequent immortality of the human soul using analogies of nature. Kant plainly admired Herder's wide learning and fertile imagination, but the tone of his reviews is condescending, since he plainly regarded the ideas of his former student as lacking in philosophical rigor, and as permitting poetic imaginings to substitute for clearheaded thinking at crucial points.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In 1800 the Protestant Cantor, Christian Gottlieb Mielcke (1733–1807), published a bilingual Lithuanian–German dictionary that was based on a previous work dating from 1747 by the Protestant pastor, Philipp Ruhig (1675–1749), who had also published the first collection of Lithuanian folk songs. The work appeared in Königsberg with the publisher Hartung and included, as announced in the detailed subtitle, a preface by Mielcke, a second preface by the Berlin Protestant preacher and deacon, Daniel Jenisch (1762–1804), a third preface by the Königsberg church and school official, Christoph Friedrich Heilsberg (1726 or 1727–1804), and a “postscript of Herr Professor Kant”. Jenisch had been a student of Kant's and had gone on to publish on Kant's moral philosophy. Heilsberg and Kant had been fellow students. The Mielcke family (Milkus in Lithuanian) belonged to the Lithuanian minority that lived in Eastern Prussia (part of the Duchy and later Kingdom of Prussia), constituting Little Lithuania, which was predominantly Protestant. The majority of Lithuanians had lived in the dominantly catholic Grand Duchy of Lithuania that had been politically united with Poland since the sixteenth century. With the three Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, 1793, and 1795 among Russia, Prussia and Austria, the Lithuanians' territories fell to Russia, and the Grand Duchy ceased to exist.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

The Lectures on Pedagogy stem from a course on practical pedagogy that the philosophy faculty at the University of Königsberg was required to offer as well as to rotate among its professors. Kant taught the course four times: winter semester 1776–7, summer semester 1780, winter semester 1783–4, winter semester 1786–7. His text the first time he offered the course was Johann Bernhard Basedow's Methodenbuch für Väter und Mütter der Familien und Völker (Altoona and Bremen, 1770). In 1774 Basedow had founded the Philanthropinum Institute in Dessau, a Rousseau-inspired educational experiment that Kant greatly admired. (See also Kant's Essays Regarding the Philanthropinum, pp. 100–4 in this volume.) From 1780 on Kant was required to use his former colleague Friedrich Samuel Bock's book, Lehrbuch der Erziehungskunst zum Gebrauch für christliche Eltern und künftige Jugendlehrer (Königsberg and Leipzig, 1780). However, in keeping with his general practice regarding the “required text rules” that were common at the time, Kant's own lecture notes follow neither Basedow nor Bock at all closely.

Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert, co-editor of the first collected edition of Kant's works, reports that towards the end of his life Kant offered his lecture notes on pedagogy – “which according to the habit of the philosopher consisted in individual scraps of paper (einzelne Papierschnitzel)” – to his younger colleague Friedrich Theodor Rink, “in order to select out from them the most useful ones for the public.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

Each of the following short pieces appeared originally in the Königsbergische gelehrte und politische Zeitung, and each also strongly reflects Kant's intense admiration for the Philanthropinum institutes of education that were first established by Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724–90). At the end of the Friedländer lectures on anthropology, Kant summarizes his hopes for these institutes as follows:

Building on Rousseau's appeal for educational methods that would work with rather than against nature, the Philanthropinum institutes introduced a variety of pedagogical techniques and priorities that have since earned a place in the educational mainstream – e.g., conversation-based approaches to foreign language teaching (including Latin), gymnastics and physical education, and less stress on memorization. But above all, it was the non-sectarian and cosmopolitan emphases of Basedow's curriculum that appealed to Kant.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

On 18 April 1782, the supplement to issue No. 31 of the Königsbergische Gelehrte und Politische Zeitungen (Königsberg Learned and Political Newspaper) contained a piece that was occasioned by the influenza epidemic of the spring of that year. The piece consisted of a short introduction written by Kant and the “Nachricht” (Note) proper by the London physician, John Fothergill, in a German translation made by Kant's friend and colleague, Christian Jacob Kraus. Fothergill's text had originally appeared in Gentleman's Magazine, vol. xliv from February 1776, p. 65 column b.

In his introductory remarks Kant approaches the influenza epidemic of 1782 from the perspective of physical geography, noting the spread of the disease from East to West and drawing parallels to other epidemics of the recent and distant past. Moreover, he endorses the view, still not uncontested at the time, that influenza does not arise due to a corruption of the properties of the air but by contagion from already afflicted persons. Kant intends the publication of Fothergill's account of an earlier influenza epidemic as an incentive and a basis for the comparative study of the two epidemics, which he takes to be the occurrences of the same disease.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In 1796 the physician and anatomist, Samuel Thomas Soemmerring (1755–1830) published an eighty-page treatise entitled Über das Organ der Seele (On the Organ of the Soul), in the first part of which he described the anatomy of the human brain by detailing the path of the nerves from the various regions of the body to their endings in the brain's ventricles and the liquid they contain. He discussed the role of the ventricular liquid in terms of the traditional psycho-physiological concept of the sensorium commune (common sensory organ), in which the different sensory data converge and combine. In the second part of the work Soemmerring went on to speculate about the vital properties of the ventricular liquid and its function as the “seat” (Sitz) or “organ” (Organ) of the soul, thereby pursuing the specific localization of psychic entities in the anatomy of the human brain.

Prior to publication Soemmerring had sent the completed manuscript of his work to Kant, indicating his intention to dedicate the work to Kant. Kant responded with a letter to Soemmerring dated 10 August 1795 that contained his thanks for the planned dedication and included as an insert a detailed statement on Soemmerring's work, to be used as Soemmerring saw fit. Soemmerring thanked Kant for the statement and the permission in a letter dated 22 August 1795, in which he also stressed his caution in using the terms “seat of the soul” and “common sensory organ” and greeted with enthusiasm Kant's speculations on the organizational properties of liquids, specifically of the “brain water” (Hirnwasser).

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

This essay appears to have been occasioned by a passing remark made by Kant's colleague and follower Johann Schultz in a 1784 article in the Gotha Learned Papers (see Note 1 below). In order to make good on Schultz's remark, Kant wrote this article, which appeared in the Berli- nische Monatsschrift late in the same year.

This is the first, and despite its brevity the most fully worked out, statement of his philosophy of history. The “idea” referred to in the title is a theoretical idea, that is, an a priori conception of a theoretical program to maximize the comprehensibility of human history. It anticipates much of the theory of the use of natural teleology in the theoretical understanding of nature that Kant was to develop over five years later in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. But this theoretical idea also stands in a close and complex relationship to Kant's moral and political philosophy, and to his conception of practical faith in divine providence. Especially prominent in it is the first statement of Kant's famous conception of a federation of states united to secure perpetual peace between nations.

The Idea for a Universal History also contained several propositions that were soon to be disputed by J. G. Herder in his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, leading to Kant's reply in his reviews of that work (1785) and in the Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786).

Prefatory remarks (1.1–14.3)

Preliminaries I: the target of the Timaeus

1It seems to me to be glaringly clear to all who are not utterly blind to serious literature that the aim of the Platonic Timaeus5 is firmly fixed upon the whole of physical inquiry, and involves the study of the All, dealing with this from beginning to end. Indeed, the Pythagorean Timaeus' own work has the title On Nature in the Pythagorean10 manner. This was, in the sillographer's words, [the point] ‘from which Plato began when he undertook to do Timaeus-writing’. We used this work as an introduction to our commentary, so that we should be able to know which of the claims of Plato's Timaeus15 are the same, which are additional, and which are actually in disagreement with the other man's – and make a point of searching for the reason for the disagreement. This whole dialogue, throughout its entire length, has physical inquiry as its aim, examining the same matters simultaneously in images and in paradigms, in wholes and in parts.20 It has been filled throughout with all the finest rules of physical theory, tackling simples for the sake of complexes, parts for the sake of wholes, and images for the sake of their originals, leaving none of the originative causes of nature outside the scope of the inquiry.

The structure of book 1 of Proclus' commentary

Book one covers the first 204 pages of the first volume of the Greek edition by E. Diehl. In the course of these two hundred pages Proclus introduces his treatment of the work as a whole in about thirteen pages. He then discusses just under fourteen pages of Burnet's Greek text of Plato, from 17a to 27b of the Stephanus edition that supplies the universal method of referring to Plato's text in modern times. That means that it is entirely given over to matters that precede Timaeus' treatment of the physical world, the part that has been so influential over two millennia, and the only part of interest to many scholars. In the course of these pages Socrates had provided a summary of some of the most prominent features of the state that had been proposed at length in the Republic, explaining that he would like to be able to picture that state in operation. And then Critias had explained the feast of words that others then present planned to offer Socrates in return, including a preliminary treatment of a story supposed to have been passed down to him by his grandfather, who had heard it from Solon, who had in turn heard it from an Egyptian priest. That story had been about a conflict between prehistoric Athens, the city of Athena, and Atlantis, once sacred to Poseidon.