ABSTRACT
The previous four chapters examined the transcendental and empirical “anthropologies” expressed in various written works and unpublished lectures composed by Kant over his lifetime. At the end of his life, however, when Kant wrote the only published work he entitled Anthropology, this book was neither Transcendental Anthropology nor Empirical Anthropology but Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. And throughout his life, Kant taught “Anthropology” courses that cannot be described as either transcendental or empirical. Instead, what Kant sought to do, throughout his life and especially in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, was to develop a new approach to thinking about human beings, one that combined theoretical insight into human nature with humans' fundamental practical concerns, and one that avoided stale, metaphysical debates about such things as the relationship between mind and body, while providing a useful, philosophically sophisticated, systematic answer to the question “What is the human being?” In his “pragmatic” anthropology, Kant pulls together his transcendental and empirical anthropologies into a coherent whole that can help his readers “properly fulfill [their] station in creation” (20: 41). While not the arena within which Kant answers all the questions of philosophy, pragmatic anthropology marks a culmination of Kant's anthropology where he most fully combines philosophical insights with empirical-psychological observations of human beings in order to improve humans' cognition, feelings, and actions.
