KANT (Immanuel).
Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht abgefasst.
The first published version of Kant’s major contributions to the early development anthropology and psychology, originally written as a manual for a course of lectures delivered over a period of thirty year period at the University of Konigsberg. Although Kant was by no means the first German academic to lecture under this title, he consciously broke with the ‘empirical psychology’ of his day and the tradition of “German anthropology stretching back to the 16th century, a tradition that tended to conceive of anthropology as a unified science of theology and physiology” (Jacobs & Kain, pp. 2-3).
The Anthropologie was Kant’s attempt to catalogue the powers of the mind and to describe their functions in some detail, in which he classified the mental diseases and analysed sensation, imagination and feeling, concluding that the study of man could not be scientific since it was not readily quantifiable. Kant “introduces a point of view and a methodological suggestion which at the same time was highly original and which was to prove extremely fruitful. Kant suggested that mental disease has something to do with the interaction of man’s need and the demands his environment makes upon him, or the frustration to which it subjects him” (Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology, pp. 308-09).
Warda, 195; Adickes, 98.
