Michael J. Olson

Problematic perceptions about race damage our society. These attitudes can seem impossible to overcome, but philosophers Dr Jennifer Mensch, at Western Sydney University in Australia, and Dr Michael Olson, at Marquette University in the US, beg to differ. They are compiling a collection of 18th-century philosophical and scientific texts that helped shape the way people saw race across the Western world, and were used to justify colonisation. They believe that by exposing these historical roots of racism, opportunities to improve societal attitudes to race will become easier to identify. This article was produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

Kant's response to ‘Hume's problem’ in his analysis of the a priori structure of causality as law-governed succession in the Second Analogy of Experience has unquestionably overshadowed the account of simultaneity (Zugleichsein), which follows in the Third Analogy. The analysis of simultaneity in the first Critique relies entirely upon that of succession and is ultimately no more than a more complicated variant of the causal dependence of substances: two objects are experienced as simultaneous only when each of those objects grounds some determination of the other, that is when they are reciprocally determined in dynamic community. By investigating Kant's remark in the third Critique that the experience of the sublime “makes simultaneity intuitable” this paper develops a Kantian analysis of simultaneity that is irreducible to the more prominent analysis of causal succession. This more robust account of simultaneity is then seen to play an essential role in the constitution of the objects of perception (and not only the regulation of their relations) as thematized in the Axioms of Intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason.

This paper argues that the famous passage that compares Kant’s efforts to reform metaphysics with his transcendental idealism to the earlier Copernican revolution in astronomy has a more systematic significance than many recognize. By examining the totality of Kant’s references to Copernicus, one can see that Kant’s analogy points to more than just a similar reversal of perspective. By situating Kant’s comments about Copernicus in relation to his understanding of the logic implicit in the great revolutions in mathematics and natural science, this paper argues that Kant’s appeal to the Copernican revolution in astronomy as a forebear to his own transcendental project indicates that his attempt to revolutionize metaphysics by setting it on the secure path of the sciences demands a shift in how we think of the proper object of metaphysics.

ABSTRACTThe early history of anthropology in eighteenth-century Germany wove together contributions from medicine, metaphysics, and a host of other disciplines in an attempt to develop a holistic ‘science of man.’ This paper examines a literary text written by prominent figure in that movement, Johann Gottlob Krüger’s Dreams. The collection of parables staged as dreams in this book presents specifically literary cases against the sufficiency of either philosophy or physiology for the study of human life as a whole. Through close readings of a number of these dreams and related texts, this paper shows how Krüger’s Dreams advocates an approach to anthropology that recognizes the importance of literature for an interdisciplinary study of human life. More than simply recognising literary writing as another means of studying human life, the vision of a new anthropology implied in this book draws on literary devices to counter the overconfidence and partisanship of existing philosophical and medical theories of human nature.