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

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments Some books are the result of what their primary creators are wont to think of as noble, self-consciously determined, long-term goals; others might better be described as the willfully sustained product of the confluence of chance events. The present volume belongs far more to the second of these categories than the first, and it is certainly not the sort of book on Kant that I could have ever imagined publishing during the years when I, under the supervision of A. C. Genova in the philosophy department at the University of Kansas, was working on the dissertation on Kant’s third critique, the Kritik der Urteilskraft, that I defended in the summer of 1987. I did, however, during that time, working together with a KU graduate school colleague, Joseph Van Zandt, complete a very rough translation of Kant’s 1788 Teutscher Merkur article, “Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie” (On the use of teleological principles in philosophy ), which I had hoped would be of some importance for my dissertation research, as it might well have been, but wasn’t. Some years later, while enjoying a dinner held in conjunction with some conference or other either sponsored or cosponsored by the philosophy department at the University of Memphis, I overheard Robert Bernasconi (then the department’s Moss Professor of Philosophy) at a nearby table discussing with someone the need for translations of a couple of Kant texts for publishing projects on which he was working. I made a point then of talking with Robert later that evening and informed him that I had a draft translation of one of the texts in which he had expressed interest, which he cordially agreed to take a look at. That draft, however, which Robert first read on the computer paper printout from the mainframe FRED QED line-oriented text editor that I had made use of in typing up the translation that Joe and I had prepared, was deemed wanting . I nevertheless told Robert I was certain I could improve on that earlier work, and eventually, with many probing questions and much help from him, earlier versions of two of the translations that appear in this volume (Kant’s 1777 and 1788 articles) were deemed acceptable for publication in the two volumes either edited or coedited by Robert that appeared in 2000 and 2001 (referenced in the Selected Bibliography below). viii Acknowledgments Near final versions of all the translations included in this volume were completed six or seven summers ago, not, however, without the help of several individuals who merit special mention. In particular, I would like to thank Mark Larrimore (associate professor of religious studies at Eugene Lang College , The New School for Liberal Arts), whose comments on the Kant texts of 1775, 1777, and 1785 were especially helpful; I only wish that Mark had had the time to make comments on my translation of Kant’s 1788 text, which, I am certain, would also have benefitted from his attention. The translation of Christoph Meiners’ 1790 article similarly benefitted greatly from the assistance of two individuals who provided me with even more extensive criticisms than did Mark—Hugh A. West (professor of history, University of Richmond), and another friend from graduate school, Lisabeth Hock (now associate professor of German at Wayne State University). The translation that appears in this volume owes much then to comments from both West and Lisa on my first draft translation, which I had apparently thought much better than it must—judging from their comments, especially those of West—have been. Since neither West nor Lisa ever reviewed the translation that appears in this volume, I must, however, take full responsibility for the published version. For the translations of Latin and French text and titles, I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of my Western colleagues, respectively, James MacGregor (associate professor of history) and Susan Hennessy (professor of French), as well as John Lomax (professor of history at Ohio Northern University ), who filled in for MacGregor with work on what proved to be some of the most difficult passages at a critical time when my Western colleague (who, in the meantime, has accepted a position with Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar) was not available. I wish also to thank the two anonymous reviewers for SUNY Press who read the penultimate version of the manuscript in the period from late 2009 through the spring of 2010, especially the one who was kind enough...