Translator's introduction

Summary

Kant began lecturing on Anthropology in the winter of 1772–1773. The earliest transcriptions of these lectures that have come down to us are the Collins text and the Parow text. Both are evidently lectures on Baumgarten's empirical psychology; and both texts are fairly extensive: Collins is nearly 240 printed pages. It is a compilation from notes taken by seven transcribers. After a brief “Prolegomena” and introductory “Treatise,” it begins by treating the human understanding, or faculty of theoretical cognition, followed by discussions of special talents and diseases of the mind, then passes on to a treatment of the faculty of taste, and ends with a discussion of the faculty of desire, including a treatment of affects and passions, and of human character.

The selections translated here include the opening Prolegomena and Treatise, which discuss the aims and method of anthropology, a selection from Kant's discussion of taste, and a very brief excerpt presenting Kant's conception of character, as it appears in his earliest lectures.