Abstract
Immanuel Kant helped launch “the next big thing” in German Idealism during the summer of 1791, two months after celebrating his sixty-seventh birthday. It had been ten years since the publication of his long-awaited Critique of Pure Reason, and the past decade had been filled with a remarkable output of writings developing Kant’s “critical philosophy,” including his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), as well as an important second edition of the first Critique (1787). Although the first Critique lacked sympathetic and competent early readers, support for his philosophical innovations widened steadily during the 1780s, and a growing stream of pilgrims began to make their way to Königsberg, a city of fifty thousand souls lying in the far northeastern corner of Europe.1
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Notes
I have drawn primarily from the following early sources: Johann Christoph Mortzfeld, Fragmente aus Kants Leben. Ein biographischer Versuch (Königsberg: Hering und Haberland, 1802); Ludwig Ernst Borowski, Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kants, Von Kant selbst genau revidirt und berichtigt (Königsberg: Nicolovius, 1804); Reinhold Bernard Jachmann, Immanuel Kant geschildert in Briefen an einen Freund (Königsberg: Nicolovius, 1804); Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren. Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis seines Charakters und häuslichen Lebens aus dem täglichen Umgange mit ihm (Königsberg: Nicolovius, 1804); Johann Gottfried Hasse, Letzte Äusserungen Kants von einem seiner Tischgenossen (Königsberg: Nicolovius, 1804); Friedrich Theodor Rink, Ansichten aus Immanuel Kants Leben (Königsberg: Goebbels und Unzer, 1805); and material gathered in 1804 for Samuel Gottlieb Wald’s memorial address for Kant, but first published in Rudolf Reicke, Kantiana. Beiträge zu Immanuel Kants Leben und Schriften (Königsberg: Theile, 1860).
Emil Arnoldt assessed the above and other material in his “Kants Jugend und die fünf ersten Jahre seiner Privatdocentur,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 18 (1881): 606–86. Still definitive is Karl Vorländer, Immanuel Kant, der Mann und das Werk, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Meiner, 1924);
and the more recent (and in English) Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
both of which I have made constant use. Finally, an excellent brief developmental summary of Kant’s writings can be found in Paul Guyer, Kant (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 1.
On Kant’s experiences here, see Heiner F. Klemme, Die Schule Immanuel Kants. Mit dem Text von Friedrich Schiffert über das Königsberger Collegium Fridericianum, 1741 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994), esp. 32–60.
Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 258.
Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 258–59.
Benno Erdmann, Martin Knutzen und seine Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wolfischen Schule und insbesondere zur Entwicklungsgeschichte Kants (Leipzig: Voss, 1876), 116.
Heilsberg, quoted in Reicke, Kantiana, 48; and Borowski, Darstellung, 28. See also Manfred Kuehn, “Kant’s Teachers in the Exact Sciences,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11–30.
See Hans-Joachim Waschkies, Physik und Physikotheologie des jungen Kant. Die Vorgeschichte seiner Allgemeinen Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1987), 20n4.
Most of the data regarding Kant’s teaching comes from Emil Arnoldt, Gesammelte Schriften, 10 vols., ed. Otto Schöndörffer (Berlin: Cassirer, 1906–11), vols. 4–5.
Franz Eulenburg, Die Frequenz der deutschen Universitäten von ihrer Gründung bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Teubner, 1904), 296.
From a recently discovered reflection of Kant’s, reproduced in Steve Naragon and Werner Stark, “Ein Geschenk für Rose Burger,” Kant-Studien 104, no. 1 (2013): 5. See also Jachmann, Immanuel Kant, 28–29; Kant’s “Announcement of the Program of his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765–1766” (1765; Ak 2:307); and the Dohna logic lectures of 1792 (Ak 24:698).
From a letter written by an Austrian nobleman, W. J. G. von Purgstall (1773–1812), and quoted in Karl Hugelmann, “Ein Brief über Kant,” Altpreussische Monatsschrift 16 (1879): 608–9.
C. F. Jensch, as quoted in Johann Friedrich Abegg, Reisetagebuch von 1798 (Frankfurt: Insel, 1976), 251.
Apart from Kuehn’s biography, see also his “Kant’s Critical Philosophy and Its Reception — the First Five Years (1781–1786),” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 630–63; Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Brigitte Sassen, Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
and Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Christian Friedrich Reusch, Kant und seine Tischgenossen. Aus dem Nachlaß des jüngsten derselben, des Geh. Ob.-Reg.-Rats Dr. Chr. F. Reusch (Königsberg: Tag & Koch, 1848), 5.
August Hagen, “Kantiana,” Neue Preußische Provinzial-Blätter 6 (1848): 16.
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Naragon, S. (2014). Kant’s Career in German Idealism. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_2
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