Kant's Anthropology as a Theory of Integration

Abstract

Although Kant did not have much original to say about the human body, he did have highly original and influential ideas about the nature of the human species. Before Kant, two divergent approaches to humankind had dominated the intellectual landscape. On the one hand, one would try to understand human nature by focusing on the immaterial soul, the latter taken to be that which is uniquely endowed with reason (an approach prominent in rational psychology as well as Leibniz-Wolffian substance metaphysics and theology), On the other hand, by contrast, one would try by focusing on the physiology of the human body and its unique features (as it is done in natural history and medicine). Kant rejects both. Direct knowledge of the soul is impossible, he maintains, on the grounds that it does not fulfill the transcendental conditions of knowledge that he has demonstrated to be the case in his critical philosophy; and merely observational knowledge of the physiology of the homo sapiens, as we call it today, is meaningless as long as it remains disconnected from the means and