Opuscules sur l'histoire

by Immanuel Kant

Tout en dégageant les conditions d’émergence de la liberté, les écrits de Kant sur l’histoire ont aussi un aspect plus classique, puisqu’il s’agit là de découvrir les fins de la nature et de l’aider à les accomplir.
Cette référence à la finalité naturelle permet à Kant d’établir une continuité entre la raison commune et la réflexion critique, en explicitant les conditions auxquelles les exigences de la raison peuvent être réalisées dans le monde sensible : en ce sens, l’histoire idéale que décrit Kant est le corrélat réaliste de sa philosophie morale.

Ce volume contient :
• Des différentes races humaines
• Idée d’une histoire universelle au point de vue cosmopolitique
• Compte rendu de l’ouvrage de Herder…
• Définition du concept de race humaine
• Conjectures sur les débuts de l’histoire humaine
• Sur l’emploi des principes téléologiques dans la philosophie
• Le Conflit des facultés

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 13, 2021

About the author

Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century philosopher from Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He's regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe & of the late Enlightenment. His most important work is The Critique of Pure Reason, an investigation of reason itself. It encompasses an attack on traditional metaphysics & epistemology, & highlights his own contribution to these areas. Other main works of his maturity are The Critique of Practical Reason, which is about ethics, & The Critique of Judgment, about esthetics & teleology.

Pursuing metaphysics involves asking questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Kant suggested that metaphysics can be reformed thru epistemology. He suggested that by understanding the sources & limits of human knowledge we can ask fruitful metaphysical questions. He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects that the mind can think about must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality–which he concluded that it does–then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it's possible that there are objects of such a nature that the mind cannot think of them, & so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. So the grand questions of speculative metaphysics are off limits, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind. Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists & the rationalists. The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired thru experience alone, but the rationalists maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed under pure reason. Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists & empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer saw themselves as correcting and expanding Kant's system, thus bringing about various forms of German Idealism. Kant continues to be a major influence on philosophy to this day, influencing both Analytic and Continental philosophy.