ABSTRACT
Like many of Kant’s references to Islam or an Islamic Orient, this mention of Turkey takes place within a footnote. The passage concerned is a reference to a moment in Kant’s Anthropology where, having defi ned the “law of association” as a series of empirical pictures which follow one another, Kant speaks of the common experience of losing one’s thread in the middle of a point. When we are lost, says Kant, we have the feeling of having skipped two or three links in the chain of our thought. Here Kant’s footnote is both illustrative and preventative: don’t plunge your provincial listener immediately into the exotic-speak to them of what is near and immediate. A question, in other words, not so much of how to orientate oneself in thinking, but rather of how not to disorientate one’s partner.
