BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

RATIONALITY AND EMBODIED PRACTICE
lectures given over a long period of time. On pedagogy, for instance, was
based on lectures he began to give in 1776, while the lectures on which
Anthropology was based date back to 1772 or even earlier. He gave his
first lectures on logic in the early 1760s. 3 My guess is that Kant’s new
ideas on rationality emerged during the 1760s, inspired by his reading of
Rousseau's Émile, amongst other things. I will return to this point again
and in a later chapter I shall argue that Kant espoused this pragmatic
theory of embodied rationality in 1781 when he published his first
Critique, and that it influenced both the cognitive theory and the
epistemology of the work.
That Kant puts forward a pragmatic theory of embodied rationality
in his writings on anthropology, pedagogy and logic is, as far as I know, a
fact that has been almost completely ignored. 4 I think this overwhelming
lack of recognition may be due to a number of reasons. One possible
explanation is that what I call Kant’s pragmatic theory of embodied
rationality is found in passages scattered throughout a number of texts
none of which contains an explicit and comprehensive formulation of it.
Secondly, the texts in which these passages are found belong to a group
of texts, such as his writings on anthropology and pedagogy, that are
typically not very highly valued in the Kant research. A third, and by no
means trivial reason, may be that the theory is overlooked either because
it does not fit into what the interpreters regard as philosophy proper, or
simply that it does not correspond to what they expect to find in an
eighteenth-century philosopher. I will return to this point later.
Earlier I mentioned how Kant’s anthropological writings were
generally regarded as having little or no philosophical relevance. This, I
think, is even more the case where his pedagogical writings are
concerned. They have typically been regarded as little more than a
collection of practical and didactic bits of advice containing little of any
originality. Weisskopf even claims that On pedagogy cannot be regarded
as an authentic work by Kant at all and should therefore be removed
from the corpus. 5 Even if it may very well be the case that not all parts of
On pedagogy (which was compiled by Brink, a contemporary of Kant)
are authentic, 6
the general estimation of Kant’s writings on pedagogy
3
Cf. Oberhausen (1997), 108.
4
The only exception I am aware of is Svendsen (1999). As for the Critique,
however, a number of authors have commented upon the pragmatic strains of
this text, e.g. Bennett (1966).
5
Weisskopf (1970).
6
Cf. e.g. Beck (1979).
81