Kant's Lectures on Anthropology
A Critical Guide

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to Kant's lectures on anthropology and their philosophical importance.

Alix Cohen (Edited by)

9781107024915, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 October 2014

288 pages, 5 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.57 kg

'The volume addresses many important topics in Kant's anthropological writings and does so in a scholarly, philosophically sustained, and accessible manner. Alix Cohen is to be thanked for putting this excellent collection of essays together; it will prove a valuable resource to students and teachers of Kant's philosophy and is bound to attract the attention of intellectual historians and political philosophers.' Katerina Deligiorgi, University of Sussex

Kant's lectures on anthropology, which formed the basis of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), contain many observations on human nature, culture and psychology and illuminate his distinctive approach to the human sciences. The essays in the present volume, written by an international team of leading Kant scholars, offer the first comprehensive scholarly assessment of these lectures, their philosophical importance, their evolution and their relation to Kant's critical philosophy. They explore a wide range of topics, including Kant's account of cognition, the senses, self-knowledge, freedom, passion, desire, morality, culture, education and cosmopolitanism. The volume will enrich current debates within Kantian scholarship as well as beyond, and will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of Kant, the history of anthropology, the philosophy of psychology and the social sciences.

Introduction Alix Cohen
1. Kant's lectures on anthropology: some orienting remarks Werner Stark
2. Self-cognition and self-assessment Rudolf A. Makkreel
3. Kant on the phenomenology of touch and vision Gary Hatfield
4. Meat on the bones: Kant's account of cognition in the anthropology lectures Tim Jankowiak and Eric Watkins
5. The anthropology of cognition and its pragmatic implications Alix Cohen
6. Affects and passions Patrick R. Frierson
7. The inclination toward freedom Paul Guyer
8. Empirical desire Allen W. Wood
9. Kant as 'vitalist': the 'principium of life' in Anthropologie Friedländer Susan Meld Shell
10. Indispensable education of the being of reason and speech G. Felicitas Munzel
11. Kant on civilisation, culture and moralisation Catherine Wilson
12. Cosmopolitical unity: the final destiny of the human species Robert B. Louden
13. What a young man needs for his venture into the world: the function and evolution of the 'Characteristics' John H. Zammito
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of science [PDA], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Psychology [JM], Anthropology [JHM], History of ideas [JFCX], Society & social sciences [J], Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge [HPK], Phenomenology & Existentialism [HPCF3], History of Western philosophy [HPC], Philosophy [HP]