Kant's Anthropology Research Articles

Kant's Anthropology as a Theory of Integration

Kant's Anthropology as a Theory of Integration

Do We Need a New Biography of Michel Foucault?

Do We Need a New Biography of Michel Foucault? Stuart Elden (bio) In the 34 years since his death, there has been no lack of interest in Michel Foucault's work. His ideas continue to be analysed, critiqued, utilised, and cited, across an ever-broadening range of disciplines. New books of material by Foucault, whether lecture courses or other previously unpublished material, have appeared at a rapid rate over the last twenty years. Most of these have been quickly translated into English and other languages. Yet there has been no new biography of Foucault for twenty-five years. Didier Eribon's biography was translated in 1991, and David Macey's The Lives of Michel Foucault and James Miller's The Passions of Michel Foucault both appeared in 1993. Naturally, some of the many books on Foucault have had biographical elements, of which David Halperin's Saint Foucault (1995) is perhaps the key example. But that book, as with so many other interpretations and analyses had a rather different purpose than a biography in a strict sense. It was to read Foucault as a gay saint, a figure who could be held up as an exemplar of a particular way of life. I do not doubt that he can be that, but he was of course much more. The second and third editions of Eribon's biography, which appeared in French in 1992 and 2011, are important. The third, in particular, includes a lot of new material, and its English translation is overdue: the existing translation is of the first French edition (1989). Eribon's Michel Foucault et ses contemporains also includes a lot of biographical material, and there are biographical discussions in his Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (1999, 2004). Macey moved onto other topics before his own early death in 2011. His biography will be reissued by Verso in 2019, with an afterword by me. While Eribon and Macey are hard to beat in terms of their analysis and breadth of coverage, a large amount of new material has come to light in the past several years. Beginning in 1997, all Foucault's courses at the Collège de France have been published under the general editorship of François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana. The last of these appeared in French in 2015 and is currently being translated by Graham Burchell. A number of other volumes of material have appeared posthumously. These include Foucault's Introduction to his translation of Kant's Anthropology, originally submitted as part of his secondary thesis. Lecture courses from Toronto, Louvain, Berkeley, and Dartmouth have all been published, as well as volumes of interviews, radio addresses, and other talks. His activist work with the Groupe d'Information sur les prisons (GIP) has been collected in two French volumes edited by Philippe Artières and others (2003, 2013), and an English translation of some of this material is forthcoming. In 2013, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) bought a large collection of Foucault's papers from his partner, Daniel Defert, and much of this is now available to researchers. Led by Foucault's nephew, Henri-Paul Fruchaud, and with the assistance of Daniele Lorenzini, Ariana Sforzini, Elisabetta Basso and others, some of this material has been published, and a future programme is underway. In recent years we have had, for example, an early 1960s text on madness, the introduction to an early draft of The Archaeology of Knowledge, and a text on Homer dating from the same period. And perhaps the most eagerly awaited, the fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, Les aveux de la chair, was published in February 2018. Some recent books on Foucault have made use of this newly available material to fill out their analysis of Foucault. This was certainly the impetus behind my own studies Foucault's Last Decade (2016), Foucault: The Birth of Power (2017) and one for which the research is still ongoing, The Early Foucault. With each of these, taking the periods 1974-84, 1969-74, and 1950-61 respectively, I have tried to outline Foucault's intellectual history through a juxtaposition of his writings and speeches, his interviews, his lectures and...

The Origins and Principles of Kant's Pragmatic Anthropology

This article examines Kant’s pragmatic anthropology as a specific model of perceiving a human, his nature which German philosopher started to elaborate in the beginning of 1770s. This issue found its reflections in the new course of university lectures on pragmatic anthropology that Kant read before his retirement in 1796. Basic ideas of this academic course Kant has presented in his treatise “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” (1798) which highlights a new model of studying human nature. Based on the thorough analysis of this particular tractate and on the materials for the lectures, as well as Kant’s notes, the research on conceptual differences between pragmatic anthropology model and other human studies that German philosopher developed in his transcendental philosophy, as well as in metaphysic and naturalistic subjects, which he also taught in University of Königsberg, can be conducted. Theoretical backgrounds that enabled genesis of pragmatic view on a human are a part of this investigation. On this connection, a special attention is paid to the role of physical geography, its conceptual language in the genesis of pragmatic view on a human. It was physical geography, which Kant taught long before a new model of anthropology, which has led to a gradual metaphysical interpretation of Kant's view on a human, his soul and freedom. Conceptual matter of pragmatic anthropology model, its connection to perceiving a human as an active subject who with his own efforts constitutes his own nature, which, in its turn, is the part of the nature, is studied. Basic concepts of Kant’s anthropology are analyzed in this regard; their dissimilarities to empirical and moral dimensions with the help of which German philosopher is trying to answer the question: “What a human is?” are deliberated on. However, the answer to this question is fundamentally differing from the answers offered by Kant's pragmatic anthropology. Anthropological ideas of the German philosopher have essentially affected its pedagogical doctrine.

Beyond the Analytic of Finitude: Kant, Heidegger, Foucault

The editors of the French edition of Michel Foucault's Introduction to Kant's Anthropology claim that Foucault started rereading Kant through Nietzsche in 1952 and then began rereading Kant and Nietzsche through Heidegger in 1953. This claim has not received much attention in the scholarly literature, but its significance should not be underestimated. In this article, I assess the likelihood that the editor’s claim is true and show how Foucault’s introduction to Kant’s Anthropology and his comments about Kant in The Order of Things echo the concerns about finitude and subjectivity in Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I then argue that Foucault's later preoccupation with Kant's essay An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? should be regarded as an attempt to develop an alternative to the Heideggerian interpretation of Kant, and the preoccupation with finitude, that had played such an important role in Foucault’s earlier works.

Making strategy matter: Social theory, knowledge interests and business education

The tensions and challenges facing business education frame this paper, which takes a critical look at the historical evolution of business school education in the context of the present conjecture, with a particular emphasis on the role social theory can play in the analysis of strategy and ethics. Flyvbjerg's phronesis and Selznick's sociology are deployed to address the challenges facing business schools and their place in higher education. Kant's moral anthropology opens common grounds to both approaches. Our aim is to provide a platform from which business and university leaders can debate and discuss the current and future role and impact of business school education, particularly focusing on linking and cultivating ethical and strategic capabilities in management and organizational practices.

Ethics Improper: The Embodied Ethics of Kant's Anthropology

This essay examines a companion ethics to the rigorist ethics of Kant's ethical works “proper” by examining his “improper” ethics of the embodied, anthropological realm, and the central role for rhetoric and communication therein. Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View emphasizes social exchange and conversation in extended and striking ways. The importance of sociality does not merely concern cultivating taste, but additionally cultivates, in various ways, vitality of the body and the mind. Beyond mere entertainment or pleasant diversion, these interconnections between sociable exchange and the body and mind play a pivotal role for Kant's embodied ethics—reflecting a profound concern for the care of the self.

Kant, ‘anthropology’ and the new human universal

Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. A close reading of Kant's Anthropology leads to an emphasis on anthropology as a form of education for subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity. Knowledge of society must be personal and moral before it is defined by laws imposed from above. Anthropology might then be a self-learning tool for anyone who cares about making a world society fit for humanity as a whole.

Poesie as Anthropology: Schleiermacher, Colonial History, and the Ethics of Ethnography1

In 1796, Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768-1834) accepted a position as chaplain at Charite Hospital in Berlin, where on December 30th he received an invitation for tea and dinner at house of Kants Lieblingsstudent and renowned Berlin doctor Markus Herz (Dilthey 224). At dinner party on following day, Schleiermacher would begin his intimate friendship with Henriette Herz, Professor Herz's much younger wife. Henriette would introduce Schleiermacher to Berliner Gesellschaft, which by July would include young Friedrich Schlegel, who had moved from Jena to Berlin (227). In a letter to his sister, Schleiermacher describes his friendship with Schlegel as marking a new of his intellectual and social life (Brief 402, V2:177).2 Six months after their first meeting, Schlegel moved in with Schleiermacher.3 Soon after meeting Schleiermacher, both Friedrich and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, professor and critic, exhorted Schleiermacher to convert [bekehren] soon to and even to write a novel (Brief 933, V4:218). After having returned to Jena in 1800, Friedrich Schlegel writes how pleased he was to learn that his former roommate had finally begun to reflect ernstlich und so en detail uber die Poesie (Brief 791, V.3:379). Schlegel's comment, especially his use of Poesie, is striking because Schleiermacher's published work from his early Berlin period concerns not poetry but travelogues (Zur Siedlungsgeschichte Neuhollands, 1799-1802), anthropology (Rezension van Immaituel Kant: Anthropologie, 1799) and religion (Uber die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verachtern, 1799).4 Schleiermacher's explicit references to are few but suggestive; term appears most prominently in his terse and biting review of Immanuel Kant's in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), a review that concludes with unelaborated assertion that fails because of Kant's Nichtwissen um Kunst und besonders um Poesie (Rezension 1.2:369). Marked by a poetic insensitivity, Kant's Anthropologie, or as Schleiermacher calls it, his Sammlung von Trivialitaten, is Negation aller Anthropologie (365). While writing this review, Schleiermacher was also engaged in what he alternately refers to as ein Studium fur mich or der verfluchte Kalender, a project that would occupy him for over three years (Brief 910, V.4:151). This damned calendar was a history of English colonies on east coast of New South Wales, or what Schleiermacher refers to as New Holland (present-day Australia). In this essay, I consider anthropological character of work from Schleiermacher's early Berlin period, as evidenced in his colonial history of New Holland, his review of Kant's and his Reden. These texts exemplify an early Romantic challenge to Kant's anthropology and late18th-century ethnography. Functioning at intersection of anthropology and aesthetics, these early texts question categorical stability of anthropology's most basic category: human. In a move that lends his early corpus a distinctly early Romantic character, Schleiermacher appeals to as a model for using humanity or concept of the human in a dynamic and historically dense way. In first section, I briefly outline what I mean by an 18th-century German anthropology. Then I consider Schleiermacher's incomplete historical-ethnographic study of colonies in New Holland in terms of his critique of Kant's Anthropologie. Finally, I highlight traces of his work on anthropology and ethnography in Reden. Ultimately, I argue that Schleiermacher 's early oeuvre is marked by a decidedly anthropological character that relies on an analogical relationship between a self-reflexive anthropology and Poesie. Schleiermacher's review of Kant's and his colonial history of New Holland5 should be read within frame of a late-18th-century science of man or anthropology that, as Wolfgang Riedel puts it, does not want to abstract from man as a Naturwesen (195). …

Silence! When Anthropology Speaks: Recounting Kant's Narrative of Man

This paper is engaged in a dialogue with one of the minor works of Immanuel Kant's-Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The value of Kant's work is measured in the context of the Enlightenment's organization of knowledge into a science of Man. More precisely, it examines the fundamental problems at stake when the subject of knowledge is also the object of knowledge. Mainly the polemics lies in the possibility of an objective evaluation or truth and a just practice of science to assure the impartial truth of its results. It raises this question: if Anthropology speaks for the human, how does it practically do so and what truth does it speak?

'Critique' as Technology of the Self

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant's famous rubric of the 'primacy of practical reason'. In this way, too, Foucault's later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant's Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any 'break' or 'turn' in Foucault's work. In line with Foucault's repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a 'return to the ancients', I argue that Foucault's writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.

The Moral Importance of Politeness in Kant's Anthropology

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1784), Kant explains that ethics, like physics, ‘will have its empirical part, but it will also have a rational part, … though here [in ethics] the empirical part might be given the special name practical anthropology’ (4: 388). In the Groundwork, Kant suggests that anthropology, or the ‘power of judgment sharpened by experience’, has two roles, ‘to distinguish in what cases [moral laws] are applicable’ and ‘to gain for [moral laws] access to the human will’ (4: 389). Twelve years later, the first function, of applying the categorical imperative to specifically human situations, is incorporated into Kant's Metaphysics of Morals (1797).

Kritischer Kommentar zu Kants Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798) (review)

The appearance of a commentary on Kant's Anthropology is very timely, indeed indispensable, given the advent of a new phase in Kant scholarship, attentive to the writings surrounding the main critical texts as a way of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of his thought. This new approach has been partly precipitated by the 1997 release of Volume 25 of the Academy edition containing the student transcriptions of Kant's anthropology lectures spanning a period of twenty-four years. The Anthropology is especially important for understanding Kant's moral philosophy. From 1773 forward, Kant himself never taught morality without concurrently offering his course in anthropology. His own students were thus cognizant of Kant's conception of human nature. Yet during the last 200 years few have paid attention to what sort of being, in Kant's view, was called upon to fulfill the moral vocation. As Brandt points out, the Anthropology has previously provoked no notable study, no discussion among either advocates or detractors.

Beyond Ethnography: Anthropology as Nominalism

Much has been made (a good deal of it salutary) of the experimental moment in anthropology, of a heightened awareness of the text, of discourse, of the anthropologist as ethnographer and critic, of a postmodern polyphony of voices, of the end of meta-narratives, of dispersal and subversion, of metaphors and allegories and tropes, of Orient and Occident. Meanwhile. And what if anthropology has not dispersed into ethnography, voices not displaced analyses, tropes not triumphed over concepts'? What if Anthropology-the study of Man, that being who is the subject and object of her own knowledge-proved more enduring than the dulcet denunciations, the muddlers through, and the tropification of the tropics? The articles presented here suggest such a possibility. In order to introduce them we turn first to Michel Foucault, a figure absent from Anthropology as Cultural Critique.' In 1961, Foucault published his major thesis for the doctorat es lettres, Histoire de lafolie a l'age classique as well as a these complementaire entitled Introduction to Kant's Anthropology, a commentary on Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (translated by Foucault). Throughout his university career Kant taught only two courses with regularity: physical geography, the world as nature (quite popular with students), offered for over 30 years starting in 1756; and anthropology, the world as human, offered for the last 25 years of his teaching career, starting in 1772-73. The Anthropology was published only in 1798, shortly after Kant retired (Foucault 1961). Although Kant's admittedly curious anthropology has not been the subject of extended commentary in contemporary histories of the discipline of critical social thought (Norbert Elias (1982) does indeed mention it), Foucault privileged its potential modernity, seeing in it a refraction of Kant's three critiques on the level of a pragmatics of the everyday. Pragmatic is the key word. Kant distinguishes the practical point of view, which treats the moral community of thinking beings (esprits), from the juridical point of view, which treats civil society as composed of lawful subjects, from the pragmatic which treats man as a citizen of the world, as a concrete universal (Foucault 1961:27). Foucault concluded that Kant's Anthropology occupied a strategic position since it treated a critical truth about Man-the irreducible reality of the diverse forms of the concrete-the daughter, as the phrase goes in French, of the

The Structure of Kant's Anthropology

The Structure of Kant's Anthropology