ABSTRACT
Much of Kant's anthropology emphasizes universality and uniformity. His transcendental anthropology implies proper ways of cognizing, acting in, and even feeling about the world that are universally applicable to all people. Even Kant's empirical anthropology describes general properties of human nature; while Kant recognizes that “circumstances of place and time … produce habits which, as is said, are second nature,” he insists that anthropology should aim to overcome this “difficulty” in order to “rise to the rank of a formal science” (7: 121). And Kant's claim that “the human being is evil by nature” is supposed to be based on “anthropological research that … justif[ies] us in attributing … [evil] to human beings” in such a way that “there is no cause for exempting anyone from it” (6: 25).
