Ricerc@Sapienza

Kants Schrift zur Anthropologie von 1798 beginnt mit einer Unterscheidung zwischen einer Anthropologie „in physiologischer Hinsicht“ und einer Anthropologie „in pragmatischer Hinsicht“. Über diese Zweiteilung in pragmatischer und physiologischer Anthropologie hinaus taucht in Kants Werk jedoch, wenn auch nur ganz am Rande, eine andere mögliche Art von Anthropologie auf.

In a reflection forming part of Kant’s Handschriftlicher Nachlass that has been traced back by Adickes to the years between 1776 and 1778 there occurs a phrase which occurs nowhere else in the entire body of Kant’s works: “transcendental anthropology” (anthropologia transcendentalis, no. 903 in AA XV, 395).In this passage Kant places in close relation with one another the “common sense” represented by the “point of view of all other human beings” and the self-knowledge of intellect and reason.

In a reflection forming part of Kant’s Handschriftlicher Nachlass that has been traced back by Adickes to the years between 1776 and 1778 there occurs a phrase which occurs nowhere else in the entire body of Kant’s works: “transcendental anthropology” (anthropologia transcendentalis, no. 903 in AA XV, 395). Every scholar and scientist, Kant maintains here, must take care to avoid becoming a “cyclops”, that is to say, someone who observes the phenomena that concern him with, as it were, a “single eye”.

Somatology is an ‘invention’ of early modern Protestant Scholasticism and is mentioned by Immanuel Kant. Consistently with the way in which this discipline was considered in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, somatology is for Kant the discipline that has to do with material physical objects and therefore with ‘bodies’ conceived in a broader sense. But somatology is also for him the counterpart of pneumatology or psychology, as sciences dealing with the spirits of the soul.