O CURSO DE GEOGRAFIA FÍSICA DE IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804): COSMOLOGIA E ESTÉTICA NA CONSTRUÇÃO EPISTEMOLÓGICA DA CIÊNCIA GEOGRÁFICA

Abstract

There is a relative weakness about our knowledge concerning Kant philosophy and the constitution of the modern geography and, consequently, the scientific one. That relation, whenever studied, happens – many times – in an oblique or tangential way, this means that it lies almost exclusively confined in the act of notifying that Kant offered, for approximately four decades, “Physical Geography” courses in Konigsberg, or, that he was the first philosopher teaching the subject at any College, even before the creation of Geography chair in Berlin, in 1820, by Karl Ritter. Not overcoming the early spread of that act itself only made us throw a curtain over the absence of a major understanding about Kant’s tribute to epistemic justification of modern and scientific geography. To open a breach in this curtain indicates, necessarily, to lighten the role and place of “ Physical Geography Course ” inside Kantian transcendental philosophy. So, we began from the conjecture that “ Physical Geography ” has always shown for Kant as a knowledge carrier of an unmeasured philosophic sense, once it showed the possibility of empiricization of his philosophy. Therefore, a “ Physical Geography ” would be, for Kant, the empiric basis of his philosophic thoughts, because it communicates the empirics of the world invention ; it made him to build metaphysically the “ Earth’s surface ”. In the same way Geography, in its general surface , has given a particular tribute to the empiric validation of Modernity (since the XVI century), the “ Physical Geography ” introduced itself as an empiric basis to Kantian philosophical reflection about “nature’s metaphysics” and the “world metaphysics” as well.