Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-Century Writings

Notes

Notes Notes to Translator’s Introduction 1. For a more detailed presentation of this view, which acknowledges a tension between foundationalist and anti-foundationalist tendencies in the development of the critical philosophy in the period following the initial publication of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Venunft) in 1781, see Tom Rockmore, On Foundationalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), esp. chaps. 3–5, 63–140. See also Paul Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), a collection of essays written over a period of fifteen years in which the author progressively explores issues that he describes as arising from the tension between Kant’s ideal of “systematicity” with regard to the domains of nature and freedom and the demand of reason that leads Kant, in the third of his three critiques, to investigate the power of judgment (Urteilskraft) for clues as to how we might at least imaginatively—but within the epistemological framework of the critical philosophy —conceive, in Kant’s own words, how “the concept of freedom should make the end (Zweck) that is imposed by its laws real in the sensible world, and [how] nature must . . . be able to be conceived in such a way that the lawfulness of its form is at least in agreement with the possibility of the ends (Zwecke) that are to be realized in it in accordance with the laws of freedom. . . .” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews [Cambridge: Cambridge University of Press, 2000], 63; cited by Guyer, Kant’s System, 2). More specifically, for a detailed but brief presentation of the general perspective from which I approach the study of the critical philosophy, see A. C. Genova, “Kant’s Three Critiques: A Suggested Analytical Framework,” Kant-Studien 60 (1969): 135–46, and for a presentation of the “systematic” importance of the third critique and its “place” [Ort] within the development of the critical philosophy, see Wolfgang Bartuschat, Zum systematischen Ort von Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972), esp. 246–66. References to Kant’s works hereafter cited in the usual manner by volume and page number of the Akademie edition (AA), Kants gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols. to date, ed. Könglichen-preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900–). The passage from the third critique included above—which, when properly understood, actually presents a general statement of the problem central to the controversies addressed by the present volume, namely, whether or not Kant ever resolved the tension in the critical system occasioned by the conflicting demands of his fully developed moral philosophy and his career-long concern with formulating 299 300 Notes to Translator’s Introduction a properly naturalistic concept of race—would thus be cited as AA 5:175–76. (See below, n. 150, for an alternative translation of the same passage.) 2. Although this image of Kant is clear enough from the accounts provided in the standard biographies, such as Ernst Cassirer’s classic Kants Leben und Lehre [Kant’s life and thought] (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1918), and Manfred Kuehn’s more recent Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), or from John H. Zammito’s more narrowly focused study of Kant’s development during the period from approximately 1762–1773, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), the point is perhaps best summarized by Otfried Höffe in his Immanuel Kant, trans. Marshall Farrier [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994], 14: “In his classes, Kant demonstrates the unusual breadth of his horizon. He teaches not only logic and metaphysics but also mathematical physics and physical geography (an academic discipline which he proudly introduces for the first time), anthropology (as of the winter semester of 1772–73) and education (as of the winter semester of 1776–77), philosophy of religion (natural theology), moral philosophy, natural law (as of the winter semester 1776–77) and philosophical encyclopedia (as of 1767–68), even fortress-building and fireworks. . . .” For a more detailed listing of courses regularly taught by Kant, see Robert Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4–5, or the helpful tabular, semester-by-semester display of the topics on which Kant lectured throughout his entire career available at the website presently maintained by Steve Naragon, www.manchester.edu/kant/Lectures/lecturesIntro.htm; see also Manfred Kuehn, “Kant’s Teachers in the Exact...