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Philosophy 190: Seminar on Kant
Spring, 2015
Prof. Peter Hadreas
Course website:
http://oucampus.sjsu.edu/people/peter.hadreas/courses/Ka
nt/index.html
Immanuel Kant
Some Information about
Primary Texts
 The standard edition of Kant’s works in German is the Prussian
Academy Edition, Kants gesammelte Schriften. ed. Königlich Preußischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Georg Reimer, subsequently
Walter de Gruyter, 1910 -- ). References to this work are given in the
form Ak followed by the volume number and the page number.
Current Definitive Scholarly English Translation of The
Critique of Pure Reason:
 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, Guyer and Wood
trans., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
ISBN: 0-521-65729-6.
About the typographical
peculiarities of our Guyer and
Wood translation of The
Critique of Pure Reason (1998)
• Italics are used when Kant employed Latin terms.
• Bold face is used for terms that Kant’s original 1781/1787 editions put in
Boldface ‘Fraktur,’ the German font of Kant’s day. So last word in first
paragraph of Preface A, is ‘metaphysics’ in boldface. In the original Fraktur
topography it was Metaphysik.
• Kant used boldface emphasis very frequently. Every page in our translation
has something printed in boldface.
• In the notes you’ll find often the abbreviation ‘R’. These refer to Kant’s
‘Reflexionen,’ handwritten notes that appear in Volumes 14-19 in the
German Academie Edition of Kant’s works.
Immanuel Kant:
Recommended Secondary
Texts
Recommended Biography
Kuehn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
Commentaries on The Critique of Pure Reason
Adorno, Theodor W., Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, T.
Tiedemann, edit, Livingstone, trans. (Stanford: Stanford U.
Press, 2001)
Bird, Graham, The Revolutionary Kant, (Chicago and La Salle,
IL: Open Court, 2006) [879 pages]
Gardner, Sebastian, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason,
(London/New York: Routledge, 1999).
Immanuel Kant:
Recommended Secondary
Texts
Kant Dictionary
Caygill, Howard, A Kant Dictionary, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)
Excellent and Influential Secondary Text on Kant’s Life and
Philosophy as a Whole
Cassirer, Ernst, Kant’s Life and Thought, Haden translation,
(New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1981)
Immanuel Kant’s
Early
Years
1724-1774
Immanuel Kant
(Born 22 April 1724 -- died 12 February
1804, two months before his eightieth
birthday.)
“On April 22 of this year [1724] Immanuel Kant was born in
Königsberg. The Old Prussian Almanac associated the name
‘Emanuel’ with this date. Accordingly he was baptized
‘Emanuel.’ He would later change it to ‘Immanuel,’ thinking
that this was a more faithful rendition of the original Hebrew
‘Emanuel’ or ‘Immanuel’ means God is with him.’ Kant
thought that it was a most appropriate name, and he was
uncommonly proud of it, commenting on its meaning even in
his old age”1
1. Kuehn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 26.
Immanuel Kant
Early Years
Kant’s father was a harness-maker who died when Kant was
22. His mother, Anna Regina, died when Kant was 13. Kant
acknowledged a lasting debt to her love and instruction. She
seems to have been the first to have recognized his intellectual
gifts.
Königsberg, where Kant resided, was the second largest city in
Prussia. Unlike other German cities of the period it was not
highly stratified between a patrician elite and peasants. It
allowed for a certain upward social mobility.
Kant went to school at the Collegium Fridericianum, a private
Pietist foundation between 1732 and 1740, (He was 8 to 16)
Map of Prussia before 1905
Kant’s Pietistic Background
Pietism was founded in Germany by Philipp Jakob Spener
(1635-1705) The Pietists regarded Christian faith not as a set of
doctrinal propositions but as a living relationship with God.
For Pietism, the institution of the Lutheran church was
considered less important than “the church invisible”, whose
membership in principle included the whole of humanity.
Despite Pietism’s emphasis upon intuitive experience, its
adherents laid great stress upon devotional exercises. A
contemporary of Kant’s at the Collegium Fridericianum, David
Ruhnken, who later became teacher of philosophy at the
University of Leiden, spoke of the “pedantic and gloomy
discipline of fanatics” which dominated the organization of the
school.”
Kant’s Reaction to his
Pietistic Background
Kant’s reaction: “As rector of the University of Konigsberg, he
was always ‘indisposed’ when his official participation in
religious observances was required.’
Kant’s one inspiring teacher at the Fridericianum was the
Latin Master, Heydenreich who introduced him to a life-long
love of Latin literature. Of Heydenreich’s other colleagues,
Kant was later to comment:
“These men could not blow into a fire any spark that lay in us
for philosophy or mathematics,” and his friend is said to have
answered: “But they were very good at blowing it out.”1
1. Kuehn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 50.
Immanuel Kant
Early Years
The Collegium Fridericianum was a Pietist school where Kant was a student
from the time he was eight years old until he was fifteen.
“What that school offered him was solely information, and even in this
respect it remained narrowly restricted. The ideal of the old Latin and
academic school still reigned, especially in Prussia, and the aim of its
instruction was almost exclusively directed toward the knowledge and
skillful use of Latin. Even in Pomerania in 1690, an old ecclesiastical order
dating from 1535 that expressly forbade the use of the German language
during classes had been reinvoked: ‘The preceptors shall on all occasions
address the pupils in Latin and not in German, as that is frivolous and in
children scandalous and disgraceful.’”1
1. Cassirer, Ernst, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans./ J. Haden, (New Haven/London:
Yale University Press, 1981), p. 14.
Immanuel Kant
“’I shall never forget my mother,’ he once expressed himself to
Jachmann [an early biographer of Kant], ‘for she implanted in
me and nurtured the first seed of the good in me; she opened
my heart to the influence of Nature; she awakened and
broadened my ideas, and her teaching had an enduring,
beneficent effect on my life.’ His mother also seems to have
been the first to recognize the boy’s intellectual gifts, and she
decided, on the advice of her spiritual counselor, the theology
professor and preacher Franz Albert Schultz, to guide him
toward an academic education.”1
1. Cassirer, Ernst, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans./ J. Haden, (New Haven/London:
Yale University Press, 1981), p. 13.
Kant Enrolls at
University of
Königsberg
1740-1744
Kant enrolled
as a theology student, but
he was interested primarily in courses
in mathematics and physics. He was
given access to the library of his
professor and studied intensively
Newton and Leibniz. Reconciling
Newton’s and Leibniz’s a posteriori and
a priori approaches to natural science
remained a overriding problem to be
answered to his satisfaction finally only
by The Critique of Pure Reason,
published some thirty years later.
Kant Manages as a
Family Tutor
1746-1755
Kant was employed as a family tutor by
three families. The resultant social
milieu enables him to refine his social
manners. He was introduced to
influential quarters of East Prussian
society. One tutoring position took him
to Arnsdorf, some sixty miles from
Königsberg. This is the farthest away he
would ever travel from Königsberg in
his lifetime.
Kant’s Biographer, Manfred Kuehn,
Means to Dispelled Some Myths about
Kant’s Social Life as a Young Man
“Kant was a very attractive man: ‘His hair
was blond, the color of his face fresh, and his
checks showed even in old age a health blush.’
His eyes were particularly arresting. As one
contemporary exclaimed: ‘From where do I
take the words to describe to you his eye!
Kant’s eye was as if it had been formed of
heavenly ether from which the deep look of
the mind, whose fiery beam was occluded by a
light clouds, visibly shown forth’ . . .
“Yet at 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 meters) tall, and of slender build, he was neither
athletic nor an imposing figure. His chest was somewhat sunken, which made
breathing difficult, and he could not endure heavy physical exertion.”1
1. Kuehn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), p. 115-6.
“When Heilsberg [Kant’s friend and
contemporary biographer, 1726-1806]
says that Kant was ‘no great devotee
(Verehrer) of the female sex,’ he did not
mean that Kant looked down on women
or that he was a misogynist, but rather
that he was not someone for whom sexual
exploits were important as a means of
proving himself. ‘He felt marriage to be a
desire and to be a necessity,’ but never
took the final step.
Once there was ‘a well brought up and beautiful; widow from
somewhere else, who visited other relatives.’ Kant did not deny
that she woman with whom he would have loved to share his
life; but ‘he calculated income and expenses and delayed the
decision from on day to the next”1
1. Kuehn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), p. 117.
Kant Becomes a Privatdocent or non-paid
university Lecturer at the
University of Königsberg.
(1755-1770)
Aided financially by a relative, Kant was able to complete his
University degree at the University of Königsberg. To qualify
and justify his position, he wrote three dissertations. The topics
were respectively fire, the first principles of metaphysical
knowledge and the advantages to natural philosophy of a
metaphysics connected with geometry. Kant fame as a lecturer
began to spread. As is hardly suspected by The Critique of Pure
Reason, Kant’s lecturing style was witty and popular. He
illustrated his topics from works of English and French
literature, books of travel and geography.
Kant’s Approach to Metaphysics
in his Pre-Critical Works
In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics,
1766, Kant decides against the possibility of metaphysics as
traditionally pursued. Problem is justifying the purchase and
time devoted to reading a completely ‘empty’ work by the
occultist E. Swedenborg. Metaphysics is as much a wild figment
of the imagination as E. Swedenborg’s visions. But what
distinguishes Kant’s skepticism from Hume’s, or any positivist,
is that metaphysical speculations are perfectly meaningful.
“What gives us most reason to believe in the existence of a
spirit world, Kant says, is moral consciousness: obligation and
the feeling of benevolence involve a feeling as of an alien will
constraining us in a direction opposed to that of self-interest.”
(Gardner, pp. 16-17).
Kant Finally Obtains a
Professorship at the
University of Königsberg
1770-1797
Kant had failed twice to gain a professorship at the University
of Königsberg. Finally in 1770 he obtained the chair of Logic
and Metaphysics. His inaugural dissertation to this post was
On the Form and Principle of the Sensible and Intelligible
World. In 1781 he published the first edition of The Critique of
Pure Reason. In 1785 he published the Fundamental Principles
of the Metaphysics of Morals. In 1788, he published The
Critique of Practical Reason in 1788 and in 1790 The Critique of
Judgment.
Kant’s Pre-Critical Period
1770-1781
Sebastian Gardner, following many Kantian scholars, dubs
this period in Kant life, "The Silent Decade.” As Gardner
writes this was a period in Kant’s career "during which Kant
published next to nothing.”1 It is assumed that during this
period Kant pondered the many metaphysical, epistemological,
ethical and teleological impasses and inconsistencies that had
arisen during from the development the Enlightenment worldview coming to a culmination during Kant’s life and from the
Scientific Revolution in general. Kant’s response to the implicit
cultural conflicts imbedded in the Enlightenment was The
Critique of Pure Reason and the Critiques of Morals, Judgment
and Religion. 1. Gardner, Sebastian, Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason,
(London/New York: Routledge, 1999)., p. 11.
Kant’s Fame as a philosopher
and even as a sage, or perhaps
an oracle spreads widely
1790-1797
By the 1790s Kant’s ‘critical philosophy’ was widely taught in
most every German university. Students would journey to
Königsberg as a temple of philosophy. Kant was asked to give
his opinion on all sorts of questions, as if he had universal
knowledge. He was asked for example to determine whether to
vaccinate or not. During this period the legend of Kant taking a
walk, at the ‘Philosophers Walk,’ named after him, with such a
regular punctuality that people could set their watches by his
walk was promulgated. He later was quoted as saying he missed
this walk only once, with the publication of Rousseau’s Emile.
The work so absorbed him that for several days he stayed at
home.
Kant’s Old Age
1797-1804
Kant retired from the university in 1797. He began a long
manuscript on the conflict of faculties at the University. This
work in particular considered the role of theology in a
University. Kant worked on this manuscript until his death.
Kant’s last years consisted in a sad decline in his intellectual
and physical capacities. Perhaps it would correspond in modern
pathological terms – this is the instructor's opinion -- to
Alzheimer's disease. In any case, Cassirer brings evidence to the
view that Kant, regardless of the decline of his intellectual
acumen, demonstrated a sense of moral sensibility and goodheartedness to the end.
Slides #1through 5, Portrait of Immanuel Kant in mid-life:
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/philosophy/courses/100/Kant003.jpg
Slide #6, portrait of Kant as a young man:
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lj4frrMOpK1qiymnio1_500.jpg
Slide #9, map of Prussia before 1905:
http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/sites/core/files/images/Prussia_
%28political_map_before_1905%29.jpg
Slide #10, German territorial losses 1919-1945:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Germany#mediavie
wer/File:Germanborders.svg
slide #24, Portrait of Immanuel Kant as old man:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant#mediaviewer/File:Immanue
l_Kant_(painted_portrait).jpg