KANT ON PHILOSOPHICAL EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF CRITIQUE

Abstract

In Announcement of the Programme of his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765‒1766, Immanuel Kant outlined his views of how philosophical education ought to be conducted. According to him, the method of instruction in philosophy should be zetetic, which means that students should first learn to philosophize rather than (as they typically expect) to learn philosophy, that is, that learning how to think for oneself ought to be preferred over learning particular philosophical systems. Kant argued for this view by claiming that philosophy at his time was not yet a complete discipline, and accordingly, that there was no philosophical book which might be said to contain definite solutions to the main philosophical problems.Given that the claims above had been stated in 1765, and that later on (in the 1780s and 1790s in particular) Kant thought that he had practically solved (or resolved) all the important philosophical questions, it is interesting to see whether his views of philosophical education remained the same, even more so because at that time he still claimed (for example, in Critique of Pure Reason and according to some transcriptions of his lectures) that his age was the age of critique and therefore it had to be seen what will come of it. I argue in this paper that there are good reasons to believe that Kant's aforementioned claims are compatible and that the continuity of his thoughts on these things can be preserved.