Recent Kant Scholarship

Eckart Förster. Kant's Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Pp. 207. $20.95 paper.

Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain, eds. Essays on Kant's Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Pp. 265. $60.00

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason . Werner S. Pluhar, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002). Pp. 340. $37.95 cloth. $12.95 paper.

David Martyn. Sublime Failures: The Ethics of Kant and Sade (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). Pp. 253. $39.95

These four recently published books survey almost all periods of Kant's work. Essays on Kant's Anthropology offers insights into the anthropology course Kant taught from the early 1770s to the end of his academic career in the late 1790s. Cutting a wide swath through Kant's intellectual development, it presents the various periods of Kant's career as far more interconnected than separate. David Martyn's Sublime Failures and Werner Pluhar's new translation of the Critique of Practical Reason provide new insights into Kant's moral theory of the mid 1780s. Finally, Eckart Förster's Kant's Final Synthesis begins to address Kant's least understood writings: the various drafts published in the late 1930s known as the Opus Postumum, which were translated into English in 1993 by Förster himself. All of these recent works attempt to reconcile the fragmented picture of Kant's oeuvre, while carefully highlighting the many revisions Kant made with regard to his ever-evolving systematic philosophy.

Tracing the permutations of the question "what is the human being"(Was ist der Mensch?), the editors of Essays on Kant's Anthropology claim this to be a fundamental question throughout Kant's work. The various essays published in this volume attempt to articulate the valences of this question, both inside and outside Kant's more familiar critical work. Publication of this volume anticipates two upcoming volumes for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Anthropology and Anthropology, History and Education. The publication of this volume also offers an important critical assessment of the original volumes in the Akademie Ausgabe (vol. 25) which have yet to be thoroughly examined since their publication in 1997.

Many of the most prominent Kant scholars, including the general editors of both the German and English editions of Kant's collected writings, contribute to this volume with valuable results. In essays addressing Kant's aesthetics (Guyer), moral theory (Stark) and sensibility (Caygil) in relation to the lecture notes, there is a sense that the poor reception Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View received upon its initial publication in 1798 has tainted its subsequent acceptance within Kant studies. The opportunity to revisit the lectures on anthropology Kant gave throughout most of his academic career allows these Kant scholars to demonstrate the importance of anthropology on all of Kant's thought as well as point out what was missing from the 1798 manuscript.

Several of the contributors here (Werner Stark, Allen Wood and Robert Louden) make a connection between Kant's anthropology lectures and his moral theory with the provision that, to quote Stark, "the relationship between anthropology and moral philosophy is determined by the difference between is and ought: the same human behavior can and will be considered from two perspectives" (24). Yet, what connects both fields, as Allen Wood notes, is that "human beings must be viewed as free agents, not as merely links in a causal mechanism; anthropological inquiry must be the activity of a free agent engaging other free agents" (40).

Other contributors (Brandt, for example) emphasize the tension between the empirical and pragmatic aspects of Kant's anthropology against his moral theory:

The suggestion is that, in ethics, a human being should legislate for himself and act out of duty ... even in the discussion of character [in the lectures and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View], the accent falls on pragmatic interaction: we know...