The origin of kant’s anthropology

Abstract

The origin of Kantian anthropology drives to the coherence of his philosophical project: the proposition of patterns to solve human problems according to a practical finality of the social experience. Thus, this article has as background the idea that although Kant began his critical philosophy by searching for the conditions for the possibility of the scientificity for Metaphysics, he flexed his project in 1793 in view of the human being, the main object of every modern philosophy, which has Anthropology as its correspondent science. Then, I intend to expose that the Kantian Anthropology did not come from the Empirical Psychology, despite to have used it in the beginning of the reflection, due to a lack of a better manual of empirical theory; it means that although the notion of subject being essential to the critical philosophy, this notion does not satisfy human finalities, which commit to the human species, in general. Finally, I intend to show that the Physical Geography is the initial point of Kant’s Anthropology due to be the knowledge of the world as physical as human and also to the importance of man as the main object, which has made inevitable its independence from Geography, once the aim was to found the science of man. This article also shed some light on comprehending a kind of forgetfulness of Kant’s Anthropology by the current social and cultural Anthropology, which was consolidated in the 19th century.