This chapter contains sections titled: The Second Part of Morals Defining Features of Pragmatic Anthology Anthropology: Pragmatic versus Moral Defining Features of Moral Anthropology Hindrances and Helps Moral Weltkenntnis Moral Education and Character Development The Vocation of the Human Species Assessing Kant's Moral Anthropology.

Within the theory of rational agency found in Kant's anthropology lectures and sketched in the moral philosophy, prudence is the manifestation of a distinctive, nonmoral rational capacity concerned with one's own happiness or well-being. Contrary to influential claims that prudential reasons are mere prima facie or "candidate" reasons, prudence can be seen to be a genuine manifestation of rational agency, involving a distinctive sort of normative authority, an authority distinguishable from and conceptually prior to that of moral norms, though still (...) overridable by them. The anthropology lectures make an important contribution to the understanding of Kant's account of the distinctive prudential task: despite Kant's familiar complaints about human finitude and the natural dialectic of our desires, Kant offers useful suggestions about how prudential reflection can generate genuine practical guidance. Even with several significant developments in Kant's anthropological theory over time, prudential norms can still be regarded as distinctive and conceptually independent of morality. (shrink)

In the first Critique, Kant says, “[A]ll the actions of a human being are determined in accord with the order of nature,” adding that “if we could investigate all the appearances . . . there would be no human action we could not predict with certainty.” Most Kantian treatments of human action discuss action from a practical perspective, according to which human beings are transcendentally free, and thus do not sufficiently lay out this Kant’s empirical, causal description of human action. (...) Drawing on Kant’s lectures in empirical psychology and his anthropological writings, this paper offers a clear and detailed elucidation of Kant’s empirical account of human action. After explaining the connection between cognitions, feelings, desires, and actions, I show how the lower faculty of desire is governed by various instincts, inclinations, and propensities, and how the higher faculty of desire is governed by (empirical) character. I also discuss how character and inclinations arise from natural human propensities combined with other empirical causes. By looking at both Kant’s faculty psychology and his account of predispositions, I lay out an overall Kantian framework for explaining any kind of human action. (shrink)

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals , Kant explains that ethics, like physics, ‘will have its empirical part, but it will also have a rational part, … though here [in ethics] the empirical part might be given the special name practical anthropology’ . In the Groundwork, Kant suggests that anthropology, or the ‘power of judgment sharpened by experience’, has two roles, ‘to distinguish in what cases [moral laws] are applicable’ and ‘to gain for [moral laws] access to the (...) human will’ . Twelve years later, the first function, of applying the categorical imperative to specifically human situations, is incorporated into Kant's Metaphysics of Morals. (shrink)

This paper examines Kant’s anthropological project and its relationship to his conception of ‘man’ in order to show that Kant’s answer to the question ‘what is man?’ entails a decisive re-evaluation of traditional conceptions of human nature. I argue that Kant redirects the question ‘what is man?’ away from defining man in terms of what he is, and towards defining him in terms of what he does, in particular through the distinction between three levels of what I will call ‘man’s (...) praxis’: the levels of technicality, prudence, and morality. As soon as man is understood in terms of what he makes of himself rather than in terms of what he is, two crucial issues arise: what is the purpose of his making? And how can he reach this destination? My claim is that whilst the first question is answered by ethics and a doctrine of prudence, the second question is answered by anthropology. In this sense, anthropology plays the crucial role of identifying the worldly helps and hindrances to the realisation of man’s purposes—and this is the reason why it should be understood as a ‘pragmatic’ discipline.Keywords: Immanuel; Kant; Pragmatic; Anthropology; Praxis; Aliens; Human nature. (shrink)

Currently fashionable among critics of enlightenment thought is the charge that Kant's ethics fails to provide an adequate account of character and its formation in moral and political life. G. Felicitas Munzel challenges this reading of Kant's thought, claiming not only that Kant has a very rich notion of moral character, but also that it is a conception of systematic importance for his thought, linking the formal moral with the critical, aesthetic, anthropological, and biological aspects of his philosophy. The first (...) book to focus on character formation in Kant's moral philosophy, it builds on important recent work on Kant's aesthetics and anthropology, and brings these to bear on moral issues. Munzel traces Kant's multifaceted definition of character through the broad range of his writings, and then explores the structure of character, its actual exercise in the world, and its cultivation. An outstanding work of original textual analysis and interpretation, _Kant's Conception of Moral Character_ is a major contribution to Kant studies and moral philosophy in general. (shrink)

Michael Rosen; IX*—Kant's Anti-Determinism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 89, Issue 1, 1 June 1989, Pages 125–142, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 259-288 [Access article in PDF] Substitutes for Wisdom:Kant's Practical Thought and the Tradition of the Temperaments Mark Larrimore [Appendix]For much of Western history, the theory of the four temperaments played a vital part in medicine, anthropology, and moral reflection. The Hippocratic foursome of sanguine, choleric, melancholy, and phlegmatic survives on the margins of modernity, but its role in moral theory and (...) practice has been largely forgotten. Premodern understandings of human diversity based in climate, temperament, and politics collapsed with the Galenic medical tradition with which they harmonized. Yet temperament continued to be a feature of moral philosophies and philosophical anthropologies even into the twentieth century, and arguably has had a symbiotic relationship with the egalitarian aspirations of modern moral and political thought. This essay surveys the development and practical consequences of the theory of the temperaments developed by one of the greatest prophets of modern values, Immanuel Kant.Temperament was a feature in Kant's course in anthropology from the 1760s until the end of his life. Kant's teachings on temperament are by turns creative and conservative, and bespeak a deep understanding of the logic and rationale of humoral characterology in ethics. But as Kant moves from an ethics based in feeling to an ethics based on the possibility of autonomy, his theory of temperament also changes. In 1764's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant eloquently celebrates the melancholy as the temperament capable of "genuine virtue" (Obs2:217-18/60); by the time of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), he is commending instead "phlegma as strength" (a variant of a temperament he had earlier dismissed), which can serve as a "substitute for wisdom" (Ant7:290/155). 1 Both of these [End Page 259] positions are distinctive, especially for an eighteenth-century thinker. As we will see, however, they are not without precedent in the tradition of temperament theory. Whether Kant knew he was developing countertraditions of temperament or not, his arguments in each case creatively exploit tensions in the humoral system which go back to its origins in ancient Greece.The mature Kant defended the classic foursome at a time when it had come under fire from many quarters. The early nineteenth century historian of temperament theories Harro Wilhelm Dircksen thought Kant played a decisive role in saving the classical theory from oblivion. 2 Why did Kant think it worth retrieving? One would expect him to reject a category which eighteenth-century German Popularphilosophie understood as a proto-psychological category bridging the gap between body and mind, nature and freedom. Yet, as I shall argue, the very things which might seem to render a theory of temperament incompatible with his mature ethics of autonomy make it important to [End Page 260] Kant. An understanding of human embodiment and diversity like that of the tradition of the temperaments forms part of the background to Kant's practical thought, and ethical formalism makes more rather than less sense if difference is taken seriously. For the same reason, it is important to have the right account of diversity. The complicated view of temperament in the Anthropology furnishes a microcosm of Kant's understanding of the fraught role of empirical considerations in recognizing and promoting freedom in rational agents embodied in human form(s).In this essay I will (1) provide a brief survey of the tradition of temperament theorizing before Kant, and expound Kant's (2) early and (3) mature views of temperament in the context of this tradition, as well as in the context of his emerging practical philosophy. 3 Some well-known parts of Kant's ethics make a new kind of sense when read in the light of the fact that their author thought humanity subdivided into temperaments. 1. The Tradition of the Temperaments 1.1. The history of moralizing about and through the temperaments is complex and—once one moves beyond the melancholy—largely uncharted. Here I will... (shrink)