This work is the product of several years of intense study of the various aspects of Kant's work, and the attempt to provide insights for students both with respect to the details of the Kantian system, and into the development and implications of the system as a whole. During that time many individuals have contributed to its ultimate formulation, and I would like to express my appreciation at least to the more generous contributors. For a careful reading of the manuscript in its earlier forms, and suggestions which helped in many ways to improve the work and to crystalize its thesis, I would like to thank Professors Wilbur Long, A. C. Ewing, and Richard Bosley. For their interest and encouragement in the later stages of the project, I must thank Professor Lewis White Beck, and the many students who have taken my Kant seminar at the University of Alberta, especially Mr. Dieter Hartmetz. And finally, 1 acknowledge with pleasure my longstanding debt to Professor William H. Werkmeister for his years of critical advice and encouragement. Perhaps only Kant and my wife have contributed more to my philosophic development. Acknowledgment must also be made of the permission kindly granted by various publishers for the use of material from the following works under their copyright. Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck (copyright 1956, by The Liberal Arts Press, Inc.

A comprehensive account of Kant's theory of freedom and his moral anthropology.

The first comprehensive examination in English of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

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.

"What was the role of anthropology in the German Enlightenment? Why did this discipline emerge as one of the most popular modes of inquiry in the eighteenth century, permeating fields as disparate as aesthetics, medicine, and law? As the essays in this volume show, the "body" of Enlightenment knowledge was by no means universal." "During the German Enlightenment the study of nature, humanity, and everything that humanity created was the topic of the day. But the period that defined moral reason as the sovereign human faculty also applied its scrutiny to the body that such a mind inhabited. What did it look like? Could moral superiority be deduced from physiognomy?" "In the massive effort to "educate" the German populace on what were seen to be the fundamental, a priori differences (physical and moral) between the sexes and the races, the European bourgeois man was considered to embody all human virtues and talents and stem from the only race and sex capable of ruling itself democratically and rationally. To examine the role of anthropology in this enterprise, contributors to this volume were asked to investigate what constitutes the German Enlightenment's interaction between its self-proclaimed rationalism and the pervasive presence of the non-rational; that is, the corporeal."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View essentially reflects the last lectures Kant gave for his annual course in anthropology, which he taught from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. The lectures were published in 1798, with the largest first printing of any of Kant's works. Intended for a broad audience, they reveal not only Kant's unique contribution to the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, but also his desire to offer students a practical view of the world and of humanity's place in it. With its focus on what the human being 'as a free-acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself,' the Anthropology also offers readers an application of some central elements of Kant's philosophy. This volume offers a new annotated translation of the text by Robert B. Louden, together with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn that explores the context and themes of the lectures.

This book provides the first sustained attempt to extract from Kant's writings on biology, anthropology and history an account of the human sciences, their underlying unity, their presuppositions as well as their methodology; that is to say, Kant's philosophical and epistemological foundation of the human sciences.

Anthropology's Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century presents and discusses key aspects of the German tradition of philosophical anthropology from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, centering on the concept of anthropology as a study of the ‘whole, concrete man’ (Heinrich Weber, 1810). Philosophical anthropology appears during the last decades of the eighteenth century in the often practically-oriented writings of men such as Ernst Platner, Karl Wezel, and Johann Herder, and is then taken up in the twentieth century by thinkers including Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, and Hans Blumenberg. In presenting this tradition, the book serves two primary purposes. Firstly, it introduces English readers in a coherent manner to key aspects of a two-hundred year tradition in German thought. Secondly, the book analyzes in an unprecedented manner, even in German scholarship, the connections between the philosophical debates associated with anthropology at the end of the eighteenth century and ongoing philosophical issues in the twentieth century. Specifically, author Jerome Carroll argues that late eighteenth century anthropology diverges pointedly from traditional, "foundational" approaches to philosophy, for instance rejecting philosophy’s quest for absolute foundations for knowledge or a priori categories and turning to a more descriptive account of man’s "being in the world." Notably, by drawing on the epistemological, ontological, and methodological aspects and implications of anthropological holism, this book reads the philosophical significance of classical twentieth century anthropology through the lens of eighteenth century writings on anthropology.

If Kant had never made the "critical turn" of 1773, would he be worth more than a paragraph in the history of philosophy? Most scholars think not. But this text challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know.

In Paul Ricoeur's Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology: Vulnerability, Capability, Justice, Marc de Leeuw argues that Ricoeur’s philosophical project integrates the anthropological tradition while renewing its importance as a hermeneutic anthropology of human capability. Ricoeur posits that our cogito is neither its own absolute master, nor fully transparent to itself, inflicting a “wound” (brisé) and fracturing the center of Cartesian self-certainty. But the Nietzschean disillusionment that ensues does not simply amount to a victorious anti-cogito; it opens another path towards self-understanding. In place of the direct route of intuition is found a more complex way forward, one guided by interpretation. The task of philosophical anthropology is to understand the human through its interpretative, critical, and imaginative ability as well as its capacity to act towards, with, and for others; the interpretation of the world in front of us, the interpretation of “who we are,” and the interpretation of what it means to be among others (as "other selves") coalesces in an anthropology that binds the question of the self to a moral, ethical, and political project, one aiming to reflect our existence-in-common. For Ricoeur, the basic question of our subjective and normative “standing” demands a fundamental response—a response toward our own otherness and to responsibilities triggered by the appeal of Others. In both cases, our vulnerability is inescapable: we can never have an absolute self-knowledge nor an absolute knowledge of Others. Ricoeur turns this fundamental aporia into an affirmative philosophical anthropology of human action, attestation, and justice.