Ricerc@Sapienza

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”. This attitude, Kant says, is one typical of the “scientific egotist” who “presumes excessively upon his own knowledge”. Necessary for every specialist, according to Kant – be he a physician a theologian, a jurist, or even a geometer –is a “second eye” through which he can observe the objects making up his own particular field of study from the point of view of all other human beings. Kant explicitly links the perspective described here to such absolutely central themes of his philosophy as those of the “Critik” and of human reason’s and intellect’s “self-knowledge”. In these notes from the Nachlass, the considerations just outlined are framed by Kant within the context of an “anthropologia transcendentalis” that is not further defined. Aside from a few rare exceptions, these notes of Kant’s have not yet received any specific attention from Kant scholars. What, then, exactly does Kant mean when he speaks of an anthropologia transcendentalis? Is it possible to reconstruct the genesis of this expression and to find sources for it? What was the reason for linking it explicitly to that question about the possibility of intellect and reason’s self-knowledge and to the question of the “Critik”? To what extent does the anthropologia transcendentalis represent a preamble (also as regards the use of the term “transcendental”) to the mature “transcendental philosophy” of the first Critique? Why is the question of the “critical eye” posed again, in this Critique, with reference this time to Hume?