Steve Naragon

Portraits of Kant is a three-volume work on the life of Immanuel Kant, constructed from the observations of his family, friends, colleagues, and other contemporaries, drawing on more than 160 selected texts and 90 illustrations of Kant and his physical surroundings. Volume I introduces Königsberg – the city where Kant spent his entire life – and collects together observations and records of Kant’s family life and childhood, his studies at the Gymnasium and university, and his years spent as a Hofmeister in the Prussian countryside. Volume II presents Kant’s life in the university as a popular professor with observations by his students and others visiting his classroom. There are accounts of Kant’s home life and his famous dinner parties, his daily walks and travels within Prussia, and his many social engagements, along with his thoughts on women and marriage, the arts, religion and Judaism, and the French Revolution. Volume III focuses on Kant’s work as a scholar and author, along with his growing celebrity and the many visitors drawn to Königsberg to meet him, concluding with his final years of increasing debility and death. Nearly all of the source material is appearing for the first time in English, with extracts from letters, diaries, and journals of the day, as well as longer biographical sketches and memoirs. This is the only biographical resource of its kind, told through the words of those who knew and argued with him.

Immanuel Kant’s forty-one years of academic lectures have come down to us primarily in the form of a great quantity of student notes. They span eleven different academic subjects and over thirty years of Kant’s teaching career, from the Herder notes of 1762-64 to the Vigilantius notes of the mid-1790s. These notes have value to the extent they reflect what Kant actually said in his lectures. If this is granted then their value lies in several directions: they clarify and develop points made in his published writings, they consider topics not discussed in any of the published writings, they provide much of the philosophical context against which these writings were to be understood, they offer new perspectives into Kant’s intellectual development, and they round out our understanding of Kant’s life and personality. This essay briefly reviews the reliability of the Academy edition transcriptions of Kant’s notes, the relationship to what Kant might have actually said in the classroom, the question of whether Kant's lectures reflected his actual beliefs, the dating of the notes to actual semesters, the nature of university lectures of that day, and offers a brief typology of the roughly 100 sets of notes available to us and an overview of those notes available in each of the subjects over which Kant lectured.

This volume for Kant's gesammelte Schriften (de Gruyter) will bring together all of J. G. Herder's student notes from Immanuel Kant's lectures. (An associated website with these materials is available now.) These are the earliest notes (1762-64) we have from Kant's lectures (which span from 1755 to 1796) and the only notes before his professorship began in 1770. Included are improved transcriptions of Herder's notes on metaphysics, moral philosophy, logic, physics, and mathematics, and the first transcription of his notes from Kant’s physical geography lectures.

This is a draft of the introduction to a forthcoming volume that brings together all of J. G. Herder's student notes from Immanuel Kant's lectures. It is intended as a volume in Kant's gesammelte Schriften (de Gruyter). These are the earliest notes (1762-64) we have from Kant's lectures (which span from 1755 to 1796) and the only notes before his professorship began in 1770. Included are improved transcriptions of Herder's notes on metaphysics, moral philosophy, logic, physics, and mathematics, and the first transcription of his notes from Kant’s physical geography lectures.

The question of our place in nature has long been with us. One answer lies in comparing humans with other animals , thereby highlighting the uniquely human. To this end, I examine the distinction between humans and brutes as delineated by Descartes, Kant, and the Chicago pragmatist George Mead. This selection not merely assures a wide-spectrum of opinion still alive today, it marks a general historical shift from the metaphysical dualism of Descartes' mechanical world and spiritual self, to the epistemic dualism of Kant and his double sense of self, finally to Mead's naturalistic monism, in which consciousness emerges naturally from the non-conscious. Apart from illuminating issues current in the animal-rights literature, examining this single topic casts a new light on these figures, especially Kant and Mead . Descartes' dualism is understandable simply given his scientific commitments, and the chasm he found in the human/brute gap was as much a result of this scientific motivation as any religious or moral one. For Kant, brutes lack the power to judge, understand, or reason. But more importantly, they lack autonomy and are therefore without moral worth. The unbridgeable chasm, metaphysical for Descartes, became for Kant primarily moral. Brutes do have representations and desires, however, and, by virtue of being alive, an immaterial principle; Kant consequently rejected Descartes' animal-machine hypothesis. Darwin's account of the human/brute gap and Mead's Darwinistic psychology are discussed. Selfhood and consciousness are unique to humans, although brutes are conscious in another sense. Mead's different uses of 'consciousness' are separated in order to clarify this difference as well as the role of language in the emergence of mind. Mead argued that humans perceive social objects prior to physical objects while brutes perceive none of these, lacking the capacities of universalization and object-manipulation. Like Descartes and Kant, Mead minimized brute experience, thereby maintaining a wide gulf between humans and brutes despite his Darwinian naturalism.

Despite Kant's belief in a universal causal determinism among phenomena and his rejection of any noumenal agency in brutes, he nevertheless rejected Descartes's hypothesis that brutes are machines. Explaining Kant's response to Descartes forms the basis for this discussion of the nature of consciousness and matter in Kant's system. Kant's numerous remarks on animal psychology-as found in his lecture notes and reflections on metaphysics and anthropology-suggest a theory of consciousness and self-consciousness at odds with that traditionally ascribed to him

Kant’s body offered a constant target for his own remarks, both in correspondence and during his lunchtime conversations. Several good descriptions of Kant’s body have come down to us over the centuries, as well as a number of visual representations, but these are remarkably limited, given his stature in the world of ideas. A new description of Kant, written by a novelist who visited Kant while passing through Königsberg, has recently come to light. It is reproduced here — in English translation as well as the original German — and earlier descriptions of Kant are briefly recounted.

This is a discussion and transcription of a “lose Blatt” of Immanuel Kant’s that was recently located in the Dibner Library of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It briefly comments on (1) religious delusion [Andachtswahn], (2) Kant’s pedagogical aims, (3) virtue and the general will, and (4) perceptual relativism of magnitude. The sheet may have belonged to a group stemming from Kant’s copy of his Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), and its provenance can be traced to Rudolf Reicke, the Königsberg librarian and Kant scholar of the late 19th century.

The purpose of the Cambridge Edition is to offer translations of the best modern German edition of Kant's work in a uniform format suitable for Kant scholars. When complete the edition will include all of Kant's published writings and a generous selection from the unpublished writings such as the Opus postumum, handschriftliche Nachlass, lectures, and correspondence. This volume contains the first translation into English of notes from Kant's lectures on metaphysics. These lectures, dating from the 1760s to the 1790s, touch on all the major topics and phases of Kant's philosophy. Most of these notes have appeared only recently in the German Academy Edition; this translation offers many corrections of that edition. As is standard with the volumes in the Cambridge Edition there is an extensive editorial apparatus, including extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, a detailed subject index, and glossaries of key terms.