Kant's Lectures on Anthropology A Critical Guide Cambridge Critical Guides Series

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.

Alix Cohen is Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Kant and the Human Sciences: Biology, Anthropology and History (2009), and has published articles in journals including the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Kantian Review, History of Philosophy Quarterly and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.