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Elden, Stuart (2009) 'Reassessing Kant's geography.', Journal of historical geography., 35 (1). pp. 3-25.

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1 

Reassessing Kant’s Geography 

Stuart Elden 

 

 

Abstract 

 

This article offers a critical reassessment of Immanuel Kant’s lectures on 

Physische Geographie and his contribution to geographical thought more 

generally. There are a number of reasons why this reassessment is needed: 

the lectures are finally about to be published in English translation; careful 

philological work in German has exposed how corrupted the standard text of 

the lectures is; and philosophers are finally beginning to critically integrate an 

understanding of the Geography into their overall assessment of Kant’s work. 

English speaking geographers will therefore soon have access to the lectures 

in a way that they have not done before, but they need to be aware both of 

the problems of the edition being translated and the work philosophers have 

undertaken on their situation in Kant’s work and their impact. More broadly, 

the reassessment requires us to reconsider the position Kant occupies in 

geography as a discipline as a whole. The article examines the history of the 

lectures and their publication in some detail; discusses Kant’s purpose in 

giving them; and looks at the way in which he structured geographical 

knowledge and understood its relation to history and philosophy. In terms of 

the broader focus particular attention is given to the topics of race and space. 

While these lectures are undoubtedly of largely historical interest, it is for 

precisely that reason that an examination of them and Kant’s thought more 

generally is of relevance today to the history of the discipline of geography. 

 



 

 
2 

Introduction 

 

Immanuel Kant’s lectures on Physische Geographie were first published over 

two hundred years ago. They were discussed by Richard Hartshorne in his 

comprehensive study of the discipline of geography almost seventy years ago, 

a survey that has formed the basis for most accounts of Kant’s text since.
1
 

The most comprehensive study in English—J.A. May’s book—is almost forty 

years old.
2
 So why look again at Kant’s views on geography? There are four 

main reasons. 

 

The first is that the lectures on geography are far more talked about than 

read. The first full English translation of Kant’s Physical Geography is due to 

appear in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in the near 

future, in the volume on ‘Natural Science’.
3
 Although parts of the lectures 

have been available in English since the late 1960s,
4
 this will undoubtedly 

make these lectures far more widely available. What are these lectures about, 

and how might we assess their claims today? 

 

The second is that even this version of the lectures needs to be treated with 

caution. It is unfortunate that even after such a long wait the English 

audience is going to have to contend with a problematic edition. Alongside a 

contextualisation of the lectures, they need a warning about their status. The 

complicated lineage of the lectures will be discussed below, but for the 

moment it suffices to say that the text being translated is corrupted, and that 

it may well obscure parts of Kant’s intent. What are these complications and 

how might this mislead? 

 

The other two reasons are perhaps the most important. Third, these lectures 

and related writings are now beginning to receive critical attention in English 

language Kant scholarship. More detail is provided below, but the basic claim 

is that just as Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View has been 



 

 
3 

reconsidered over the past decade or so, the Geography deserves and is 

beginning to receive similar work.  

 

Fourth, just as in recent years scholarship has begun to recognise the 

complexity of Kant’s ideas of some key topics, notably race, so too does his 

view of space need to be rethought. All-too-often Kant is held up as an 

instance of views that he did not actually hold or was explicitly critiquing. 

Moving from Kant’s Geography to Kant’s geography more generally, we need 

to consider his position in the tradition more carefully. 

 

Back in 1939, Hartshorne noted Erich Adickes’s assessment of the lectures 

and agreed that ‘for geography today… Kant’s work is of little more than 

historical interest’.
5
 This paper does not seek to suggest that reading Kant 

today will radicalize the discipline, and this is not an attempt to rehabilitate 

Kant. Rather it suggests that reassessing Kant might be a useful moment in a 

broader reconsideration of the history of geography, and certainly of the place 

of Kant within it. Thus this interpretation takes issue with the ‘little more’ 

element of the Adickes/Hartshorne assessment, suggesting that its historical 

interest is precisely why we should look at it today. As Livingstone suggests, 

‘the history of geography is the history of a contested tradition’.
6
 Given that 

this is true of the history of ideas more generally, and philosophy especially, 

their point of collision in Kant is a significant marker. As philosophers begin 

the work of integrating these materials into their overall assessment of Kant’s 

work, geographers too should reconsider his views in light of the history of 

the discipline. Yet rather than do as Hartshorne himself suggests, and 

privilege Kant’s other writings over the Physical Geography, which he 

suggests should be relegated to a ‘historical footnote’, this reading begins 

with the lectures.
7 What do these lectures, and following them Kant’s writings 

on issues of concern to geographers more generally, add to our 

understanding of Kant’s geography today? 

 



 

 
4 

Immanuel Kant’s Geography Lectures 

 

Kant lectured on a variety of topics during his career at the University of 

Königsberg. These included both philosophical and non-philosophical topics. 

The lecture courses were often well attended and gained a strong reputation. 

Many of these courses have come down to us from Kant’s own manuscripts or 

from student transcripts. Today these lectures are part of his complete works, 

and are invaluable sources of knowledge concerning his work, its substance, 

coherence and development. Standard philosophical subjects such logic, 

metaphysics and ethics were part of his normal program, but Kant also gave 

courses on anthropology and physical geography on a regular basis. Initially it 

was geography alone, but from the mid 1770s geography was usually offered 

in the summer semester while anthropology was given in the winter. In total 

geography was offered forty-nine times over a forty-year period from 1756-

96—more frequently than any of his other topics other than logic and 

metaphysics.
8
  

 

Yet Kant never produced a book from these lectures. The course on 

anthropology was worked up into a book by Kant himself, entitled 

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.9 The initial print-run was for 

the largest number of copies any book of his produced in his lifetime.
10

 In 

Kant’s words the Anthropology was ‘the present [i.e. the final] manual for my 

anthropology course’.
11

 It seems that had Kant more time, he would have 

produced a volume of the geography lectures himself. But he remarked in 

1798 that a version of them was ‘scarcely possible’ at his own advanced age, 

for the manuscript he used to lecture was one he believed only he could 

read.
12

 Shortly after this comment, the first volume of an edition by Gottfried 

Vollmer was produced, apparently based on transcripts of lectures from 1778, 

1782 and 1793, but this was described by Kant as unauthorized and 

illegitimate, of which he did not recognize ‘either the material or the format’ 

as his.
13

 This is hardly surprising: much of the work is not Kant’s and this is 

not made clear in the edition itself; and there is certainly far more material 



 

 
5 

than could ever have been given in a single semester. The semi-authorized 

version which was then rushed out in 1802, two years before Kant’s death, 

was compiled by Friedrich Theodor Rink, utilizing lectures from 1759, with the 

introduction from a mid 1770s course, and is much less extensive.
14

 Rink 

claims that he has based this on three notebooks of Kant’s, but he 

unquestionably means student transcripts.
15

 Adickes thinks the first part is 

from 1775, and demonstrates that the text is unreliable in that Rink added 

notes, and altered or dropped passages of which he could not make sense.
16

 

Werner Stark has noted that the first half (which he dates to 1774) is much 

more closely edited, with additions and references, while the second half 

reproduces Kant’s text almost verbatim, even allowing a gap in the text (the 

omission of India and East Asian islands in the survey) to remain.
17

 Rink 

alludes to some of the reasons for this uneven treatment in his introduction to 

the lectures.
18

 His promised revised edition, putting good the problems, never 

actually appeared. Vollmer’s edition came out in an eventual four volumes, in 

seven parts in total, and was completed in 1805. 

 

It is the Rink edition that is today known as the Physische Geographie, later 

incorporated into the Akademie Ausgabe of Kants gesammelte Schriften [the 

Academy Edition of Kant’s Collected Writings].
19

 This is the one that 

Hartshorne utilizes, and that almost all accounts in English refer to, either first 

or second hand. Yet the dates of the materials used should give us cause to 

pause. Kant gave lectures on this topic from 1756 until 1796, and his 

comment that only he could read the text in 1798 indicates that he never 

ceased to revise it over that period. The text we have takes the introductory 

materials from a mid-period course (1774 or 1775) and bolts them onto the 

body of very early lectures (1759). At the time of the early lectures, 

anthropology was not yet being offered as a separate course, and some of 

the materials for that came from the geography lectures. By way of context, 

Kant’s mature philosophy is said to begin with the Critique of Pure Reason, 

first published in 1781.
20

 Nobody seeking to understand Kant’s considered 

views on morality, ontology, logic, physics, or, indeed, anthropology, would 



 

 
6 

content themselves with ‘pre-critical’ works.
21

 Yet that is what is usually done 

with the lectures on geography. 

 

In the early twentieth century Adickes attempted to get the Akademie 

Ausgabe to produce a new version of the Geography, instead of relying on 

Rink’s, but this was declined due to feasibility: the volume was already 

typeset. The forthcoming Volume XXVI of Akademie edition will include 

several transcriptions of the lectures, prepared by the historian of philosophy 

Werner Stark;
22

 and Volume XIV includes notes on geography, along with 

mathematics, physics and chemistry.
23

 Yet unfortunately the forthcoming 

English translation is of the Rink edition. This is certainly better than nothing 

but it is interesting again to contrast this with the Anthropology, which has 

been available in English for several years in a reliable edition, with 

translations in 1974 and 1978 and an entirely new recent translation by 

Robert Louden with extensive notes from Kant’s manuscript and a long 

introduction;
24

 along with forthcoming editions of variant lectures and note 

materials.
25

 

 

There are thus serious philological difficulties relating to reading the 

geography lectures that go far beyond their inaccessibility in English. Stark 

has done invaluable work in ordering and organizing these lectures, following 

his work on the lectures on ethics and anthropology, setting them in their 

historical context and showing the variation across time.
26

 His transcriptions 

of the handwritten student transcripts are a major work in themselves. For 

many purposes the most accessible edition of the lectures is the French, 

which although it is a translation of the Rink edition includes an extensive 

introduction and a brief appendix of variants from other years.
27

 This is the 

text used by David Harvey, whose reading is discussed below. 

 



 

 
7 

The Neglect 

 

Of all of Kant’s work, and of all his wide areas of interest, the neglect of 

geography is perhaps the most glaring. It generally merits an entry in 

dictionaries of Kant’s work, but these tend to be pretty brief.
28

 There is no 

explicit discussion in the recent A Companion to Kant,29 and a recent edited 

book on Kant and the Sciences makes only a tangential reference to 

geography.
30

 Robert Hanna’s comprehensive study, Kant, Science, and 

Human Nature, makes only two passing references to geography and offers 

no sustained engagement.
31

 Many other accounts on related topics are 

similar.
32

 The same neglect can be found in works concentrating on Kant’s 

theories of space.
33

 And while the work on anthropology has been discussed 

by figures of the stature of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault,
34

 the 

Geography has not received anything like the same amount of attention. 

 

Aside from the textual problems, one of the reasons is that philosophers have, 

by and large, not known what to make of the works. This is demonstrated in 

debates about where the anthropology lectures might be placed in editions of 

Kant’s work. If it seems unquestionably the case that today the anthropology 

and geography belong together, this has not always been the view. Wilhelm 

Dilthey and Erdmann argued that their relation was to the cosmology and 

physical geography; while Emil Arnoldt and Adickes claimed that they were 

linked to the metaphysics lectures and the section on empirical psychology.
35

 

This confusion might appear surprising, since Erdmann shows that parts of 

the Anthropology derived from earlier lectures on geography, and Kant goes 

out of his way to demonstrate the linked nature of the inquiries.
36

 Yet there is 

a certainly a link to the metaphysics lectures. Holly Wilson suggests the 

following view: 

 

I distinguish between ‘origin’ and ‘arise’: the anthropology 

lectures arose out of the psychology lectures, but had their 

origin in the physical geography lectures. Kant’s banning of 



 

 
8 

psychology from metaphysics initiated the movement toward an 

independent series of lectures on anthropology, but the intent 

and content of the anthropology lectures finds its origin in the 

physical geography lecture, which were initially given fifteen 

years prior to the start of the anthropology lectures.
37

 

 

Those that do discuss the work on geography do, sometimes, note its relation 

to wider concerns in Kant’s work. Howard Caygill, for instance, in his Kant 

Dictionary says that ‘in addition to this explicit treatment of geography in his 

lectures, it is interesting to note Kant’s reliance on geographical terms and 

metaphors in his more strictly defined philosophical work’.
38

 But this is as far 

as his link goes, perhaps understandable given the nature of his project, but 

shared much more generally. However, in recent years a number of people 

have begun to analyse Kant’s work on Anthropology in a new light, which 

necessarily forces an encounter with the Geography. These would include 

Robert Louden’s Kant’s Impure Ethics, John Zammito’s Kant, Herder, and the 

Birth of Anthropology,39 and Holly Wilson’s Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology. In 

addition Cambridge University Press has recently published a useful book of 

essays on the anthropology,
40

 and there is an exceptional recent biography by 

Manfred Kuehn which, together with Eckart Förster and Peter Fenves’s 

pioneering work on the late Kant, enables a much more nuanced situation of 

the geographical work.
41

 It is in the light of these researches, alongside those 

of Robert Bernasconi and David Harvey on race discussed below, that a 

reassessment can begin. 

 

Kant’s Pragmatic Purpose 

 

Why did Kant lecture on geography? Although it became one of his most 

attended courses, this does not explain things sufficiently. Wilson is valuable 

in tracking the changing objectives for the geography lectures, suggesting 

that initially they were ‘purely scientific, that is, to make a more certain 

knowledge of believable travel accounts, and to make this into a legitimate 



 

 
9 

academic course of study’.
42

 But the popularity of the course meant that Kant 

could begin to suggest that their aim could be ‘to civilise young students to 

become ‘citizens of the world’’.
43

 Zammito has similarly shown how the 

lectures are related to the Anthropology in providing knowledge, but stresses 

this is for a philosophical purpose.
44

 As Louden notes, therefore, their aim was 

more than merely scholastic, but rather: 

 

The anthropology and physical geography lectures are thus not 

primarily intended as further contributions to Kant’s critical, 

transcendental philosophy program… [which] was not his only 

concern. A major portion of Kant’s teaching activity was devoted 

to trying to enlighten his students more about the people and 

world around them in order that they might live (pragmatically 

as well as morally) better lives.
45

 

 

For Louden, anthropology and geography are thus ‘intersecting halves of a 

larger whole’.
46

 The problematic link between Kant’s views on geography and 

anthropology, and, especially, on race and his cosmopolitan ethics will be 

discussed below, but the point here is somewhat different. This is that Kant 

sees these lectures as providing a broad knowledge of the world as a 

foundation to the more general studies of his students, and that together the 

physical geography and pragmatic anthropology give an empirical grounding 

for his thought more generally. In a postscript to his 1775 article ‘Von den 

verschiedenen Racen der Menschen [On the Different Races of Human 

Beings]’ Kant suggested that the two lecture courses together were 

Weltkenntnis.47 This would usually translate as ‘world-knowledge’, but Wilson 

has suggested the felicitous ‘cosmopolitan knowledge’, with ‘cosmopolitan 

philosophy’ for the related Weltwissenschaften.48 This knowledge of the 

world, for Kant, was integral to the moral and political life of the citizen. Both 

geography and anthropology were taught by Kant because of their ‘pragmatic’ 

dimension, the way in which this knowledge can guide us in our moral and 

practical life.  



 

 
10 

 

This world-knowledge, this cosmology, is essential to his other writings. Kant 

suggests that physical geography is about the world as an ‘object of external 

sense’; and anthropology as an ‘object of inner sense’.
49

 Indeed, in his essay 

on ‘The Conflict of the Faculties’, Kant divides the philosophy faculty into two 

parts—the one that deals with ‘pure rational knowledge’ and one that deals 

with ‘historical knowledge’. The former contains metaphysics of nature and 

morals, along with pure philosophy and mathematics; the latter includes 

history, geography, philology, the humanities and the empirical knowledge of 

the natural sciences.
50

 Of these aspects, physical geography is ‘the physical 

description of the earth’, ‘the first part of knowledge of the world’.
51

 Wilson is 

therefore clear that the lectures on anthropology must be seen as philosophy:  

 

Kant explicitly argues that the anthropology is a type of 

cosmopolitan philosophy. It is not a scholastic philosophy, and it 

is not critical philosophy, but it is a type of philosophy… 

The twofold field of physical geography and anthropology are 

viewed cosmologically and pragmatically. In other words, Kant 

considered these two disciplines, in the way he taught them, to 

be philosophy, and philosophy that was useful for the world.
52

 

 

These lectures were to serve as a propaedeutic for ‘practical reason’, and are 

a ‘history of the contemporary condition of the earth or geography, in the 

widest sense’.
53

 This, for Kant, is ‘the preliminary exercise in the knowledge of 

the world’.
54

 Knowledge of the world is thus of both ‘the human being and 

nature’.
55

 Physical geography studies nature, anthropology the human, but 

the latter outweighs the former, since ‘nature exists for the sake of the 

human being. The human being is the end of nature’.
56

 Nonetheless, the 

twofold field of Weltkenntis needs to be treated cosmologically.57 

 



 

 
11 

The Context and the Structure of the Geography 

 

Kant was an innovator in geography, if for no other reason that he was one of 

the very first to lecture on it as an explicit topic, before it was common to 

have chairs in geography in Germany. While others lectured on it in a way 

that was more akin to travel writing, Kant attempted to systematise the 

subject, synthesising insights from a range of different sources. Indeed, his 

outline for the course was unique, and he had to ask for special dispensation 

from the Minister of Education in order to give a course for which no textbook 

could be found.
58

 The latter was of the opinion that ‘the worst textbook is 

certainly better than none, and professors may, if they possess so much 

wisdom, improve upon their authors to the extent that they can, but the 

reading from notes must simply be stopped. From this we nevertheless make 

exception of Professor Kant and his course on Physical Geography, for which 

no appropriate textbook is yet available’. Kant’s own manuscript was known 

as the Diktattext, prepared around 1759 but much amended and now lost. 

The Holstein-Beck manuscript is believed to be the closest to Kant’s 

Diktattext. After Kant retired his colleague K. L. Pörschke used the text of 

George Henry Millar, The New and Universal System of Geography.59  

 

There is not the space here to outline how Kant’s understandings of specific 

geographical issues relate to knowledge at the time and to debates in a range 

of contexts since. This has been discussed at some length elsewhere.
60

 

Nonetheless Kant’s structure of the subject is important in itself and it is 

worth focussing on this. Initially his treatment included what was later 

separated out as the Anthropology. While ‘geography’ in the late 1700s meant 

something rather different to today, and crucially depended on where it was 

being taught or discussed,
61

 what is striking is that Kant is interested in 

establishing subdivisions within the broad topic, many of which bear similarity 

to subdisciplines today, even if others are obsolete. Kant is thus trying to 

move geography—not always successfully—beyond mere ‘earth description’.
62

 

Anton Friedrich Büsching’s Neue Erdbeschreibung (New Description of the 



 

 
12 

Earth) was, as Withers recounts, based on lectures given at Göttingen in the 

philosophy department, and published in eleven volumes between 1754-

1792.
63

 Kant too depends greatly on these kind of empirical examples, but he 

tries to situate this within a broad structure of the subject. It is notable that 

the structure of most of his geography courses is very similar, even as the 

content changes. Kant begins with an introduction which provides a general 

assessment of the subject and its relation to other topics; moves to a 

discussion of the mechanics of the earth and then breaks the substantive part 

of the analysis into three parts.  

 

The first substantial part of the text is the more accurately ‘physical 

geography’. It looks at a range of physical processes concerning earth and 

water: oceans; land and islands as examples of the earth and its terrain; 

earthquakes, volcanoes and electricity; springs and wells; rivers and water, 

wind currents; climate, the atmosphere and temperature; transformations of 

the earth; and seafaring. The second part concerns the three realms of 

nature: fauna, flora, and minerals. Many of the aspects of this second part 

would not fall within the remit of modern day geography, with the exception 

of biogeography. The final part of the book offers a regional geography of the 

world, with descriptions of particular regions and places in Asia, Africa, 

Europe and America. But Kant’s Physical Geography was also a moral and 

political account, and included human beings in it, usually just before the 

section on animals, discussing racial differences. In addition there are a range 

of comments in the third part concerning their geographical differentiation. 

Humans are thus seen as part of physical geography, both because they are 

one of the features of the Erdboden—the earth’s surface—but also because 

they a causal mechanism for change to the earth itself, because they build 

dams, drain swamps and fell forests, thus changing landscape and climate.
64

  

 

After a decade of lecturing, announcing his courses for Winter Semester 

1765-66, Kant outlined how his vision had developed, and how the more 



 

 
13 

explicitly physical geography could sometimes be underplayed. This is worth 

quoting at length:  

 

Since then I have gradually expanded this scheme, and now I 

propose, by condensing that part of the subject which is 

concerned with the physical features of the earth, to gain the 

time necessary for extending my course of lectures to include 

the other parts of the subject, which are of even greater utility. 

This discipline will therefore be a physical, moral and political 

geography. It will contain, first of all, a specification of the 

remarkable features of nature in three realms. The specification 

will, however, be limited to those features, among the 

innumerably many which could be chosen, which particularly 

satisfy the general desire for knowledge, either because of their 

rarity or the effect which they can exercise on states by means 

of trade and industry. This part of the subject, which also 

contains a treatment of the natural relationship which holds 

between all the lands and seas in the world, and the reason for 

their connection, is the essential foundation of all history. 

Without this foundation, history is scarcely distinguishable from 

fairy-tales.  

 

This is a point worth underlining. As Kant claims in the geography lectures, 

geography is the ground or foundation for history, as events necessarily take 

place somewhere, in some context.
65

 This is not to assert a priority for 

geography over history, but rather to insist on their relation together, a 

complementary analysis rather than a separation. Indeed, as Withers has 

noted, it was a commonplace at the time to see geography as the left ‘eye’ of 

history, with chronology as the right.
66

 

 

The second part of the subject considers human beings, 

throughout the world, from the point of view of the variety of 



 

 
14 

their natural properties and the differences in that feature of the 

human which is moral in character. The consideration of these 

things is at once very important and also highly stimulating as 

well. Unless these matters are considered, general judgments 

about man would scarcely be possible. The comparison of 

human beings with each other, and the comparison of the 

human today with the moral state of the human in earlier times, 

furnishes us with a comprehensive map of the human species. 

Finally, there will be a consideration of what can be regarded as 

a product of the reciprocal interaction of the two previously 

mentioned forces, namely, the condition of the states and 

nations throughout the world. The subject will not be considered 

so much from the point of view of the way in which the 

condition of states depends on accidental causes, such as the 

deeds and fates of individuals, for example, the sequence of 

governments, conquests and intrigues between states. The 

condition of states will rather be considered in relation to what 

is more constant and which contains the more remote ground of 

those accidental causes, namely, the situation of their countries, 

the nature of their products, customs, industry, trade and 

population.
67

 

 

Kant therefore sets out a range of distinctions—the physical, moral and 

political geography is alluded to here, but the actual analysis is rather more 

complicated. By the mid 1770s he offers a range of possibilities: 

 

 Physical geography: the foundation or ground for other types of 

geography as well as history—a general study or outline of nature; 

 Mathematical geography: concerned with the measure of the shape, 

size and motion of the earth, and its situation in the solar system; 

 Moral geography: the relation between moral codes and customs and 

regions, a kind of spatial differentiation; 



 

 
15 

 Political geography: the relation of political systems and political laws 

to physical features of geography, part of the reason why these are 

only nominally universal; 

 Commercial [Handlungs] geography: concerned with the geographical 

elements of trade in surplus products; 

 Theological geography: concerned with theological attitudes and 

principles and their relation to physical features of the landscape; again 

a form of spatial differentiation.
68

  

 

Kant’s humans thus move from being detached from the world into closer to 

relation with the earth, nature and other humans. As the material in the latter 

part developed this led to the parallel lectures on anthropology.
69

 What the 

lectures together provide is a grounding of empirical detail. Crucially though 

they try to provide a geographical perspective on a range of social, cultural 

and physical phenomena. If geography is a study of the difference space 

makes, Kant can certainly lay claim to being a geographer. Yet, on the other 

hand, Kant was writing at a time when there was the beginning of a 

noticeable shift away from the compilation of information and reports from a 

distance. In the early nineteenth century field-based science was in the 

ascendance, with the importance of trained eye-witness accounts, following 

pioneering studies of Alexander von Humboldt, Georges Cuvier, and 

somewhat earlier, the scientists involved with Cook’s voyages.
70

 

 

The Impure Physics and the Question of Race 

 

In his lectures on Logic, Kant suggests that there are four fundamental 

questions. 

 

1. ‘What can I know?’  

2. ‘What ought I to do?’  

3. ‘What may I hope?’  

4. ‘What is the human being?’ 



 

 
16 

 

Kant suggests that ‘Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the 

second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, 

however, we could reckon all of this to anthropology, because the first three 

questions refer to the last one’.
71

 Just as these other realms of thought rest 

on the fundamental question, namely anthropology; so too do Kant’s 

reflections on the material world rest on the understanding of geography. For 

Kant, knowledge of the world is not pragmatic merely when it is ‘extensive 

knowledge of things in the world, for example, animals, plants and minerals 

from various lands and climates—but only when it contains knowledge of the 

human being as a citizen of the world’.72 In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant 

distinguishes between nature and freedom, to which accord the natural law 

and the moral law. The first accords to everything that is; the second to what 

should be. He suggests that while both have separate systems, they can 

come together in a single philosophical system—his own critical philosophy. In 

this critical philosophy there is a pure philosophy of pure reason; but also an 

empirical element, and this for both nature and freedom.
73

 In the Geography 

lectures Kant begins by distinguishing between pure rational knowledge and 

knowledge from experience, through our senses.
74

 In other words, pragmatic 

anthropology is the relation of the human to the world, and is thus what 

Robert Louden calls ‘impure ethics’.
75

 Although much of the material in the 

geography lectures would also come under that remit—recall the origin of the 

anthropology lectures—we might make a case that much of the rest of the 

geography is ‘impure physics’, in other words the empirical detail that inhabits 

the categories of abstract thought. The use of this kind of detail is 

pronounced, for example, in Kant’s third critique, especially in the passages 

on teleological judgment.
76

 And in addition, while in his Metaphysical 

Foundations of Natural Science Kant expresses the view that the empirical 

sciences require a pure grounding;
77

 his last work, the Opus Postumum, bears 

the title of ‘Transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science 

to Physics’.
78

 

 



 

 
17 

Thus while much of the detail of the Geography may be outdated and 

therefore of merely historical interest, Kant’s way of structuring geographical 

knowledge and its relation to his thought as a whole is of enduring 

importance. This importance lies both in the way he understands geography 

as a counterbalance to history, and in terms of the organization of knowledge. 

All perceived things are located in logical classifications such as those of 

Linnaeus; and in space and time. Logic deals with the first; physics with space 

and time, and of these, geography deals with space; history with time.
79

 Kant 

says that our experience of the world is limited in time—our limited lifespan—

and space—even if we have travelled extensively. So we must rely on others, 

who can provide us with either narrative (temporal, history) or description 

(spatial, geographical).
80

 Geography therefore allows us access to the 

ordering and categorizing of the world. Indeed, Kant distinguishes geography 

as the description of the whole world from topography as the description of 

single places and chorography as that of regions.
81

 Wilson thus suggests that 

the role is fundamentally different from a merely enumerative account of the 

world as it is. As she suggests physical geography in Kant’s terms ‘is not 

meant to be a description of the world as a scientist would view it, but rather 

geography is to be viewed in its purposiveness’.
82

 Thus for all their problems 

and their undoubted neglect, these lectures remain a key part of Kant’s work, 

and in recent years there has been some important discussion. The remainder 

of this essay will first discuss race—a theme treated at length in the various 

versions of the Geography; and then space, a topic which, while not 

extensively treated in the Geography, is key to any engagement with Kant’s 

geography in more general terms. 

 

The question of Kant’s racism has been discussed quite extensively in recent 

years. More challenging than his rehearsal of racial stereotypes and 

entertaining of prejudices is his theorisation of race. What this means is that 

Kant cannot simply be excused as a product of his time—trading on 

contemporary views about racial superiority and the like—because he went 

out of his way to explicitly theorise race, as a crucial category of human life. 



 

 
18 

The charges can be found in a series of essays by Robert Bernasconi.
83

 For 

Bernasconi Kant plays a significant role because he can be seen as the thinker 

who actually ‘invented the scientific concept of race’, as he was the thinker 

who ‘gave the first clear definition of it’.
84

 Indeed, Bernasconi contends that in 

doing so, he did not simply define race, but ‘played a crucial role in 

establishing the term ‘race’ as the currency within which discussions of human 

variety would be conducted in the nineteenth century’.
85

 Bernasconi’s 

phrasing is telling: ‘Kant opened up a new space for thinking: he took it into 

new territory’. While Kant may have stopped there, ‘those who came after 

him worked in the space he opened up’.
86

 Some responses have contended 

that this does not affect Kant’s broader thought, and that Kant’s arguments 

are stronger than his prejudices.
87

 But this is insufficient for Bernasconi. He 

suggests that there is a different between analytic and Continental philosophy 

in terms of their treatment of the biography of thinkers. Analytic is defined as 

‘a form of thinking that leaves no room for synthesis, holism or dialectic’.
88 

While the geographies and histories of this distinction are problematic, as he 

recognizes, there is some profit in the divide for analysis. For Bernasconi the 

analytical approach to philosophy, which tends to be ahistorical in its reading 

of canonical thinkers, means that: 

 

The racism of a philosopher is easily put to one side. Kant’s 

racism does not raise a question for his cosmopolitanism 

because cosmopolitanism can be defined in such a way as to 

exclude racism. Thus, the fact that Kant was a racist has no 

implications for contemporary Kantians. However, things are 

somewhat different for Continental philosophers.
89

 

 

Given that the fundamental philosophical influence in contemporary 

geography is from the ‘Continental’ strand, this is of crucial importance. 

 

One of the few geographers who has recognized the implications of this 

challenge has been David Harvey. In a series of publications Harvey has 



 

 
19 

related the geography lectures to the contemporary interest in Kant’s 

cosmopolitanism,
90

 suggesting, like Bernasconi, that the claims of the lectures 

render this particular concept deeply problematic. Harvey notes that many 

Kantians want to dismiss the work on geography as ‘‘irrelevant’, ‘not to be 

taken seriously’’ or [suggest that] it ‘lacks interest'‘.
91

 In this position they are 

close to the oft-quoted remark from Benno Erdmann, who described the 

Anthropology as the ‘laborious compilation of a seventy-four year old man as 

he stood on the threshold of decrepitude’.
92

 For Harvey ‘the content of Kant’s 

Geography is nothing short of an intellectual and political embarrassment’.93 

Both aspects of this assessment might be encapsulated by Kant’s claim that 

‘humanity has its highest perfection in the white race’, with ‘yellow’, ‘Negro’ 

and ‘red’ races at respectively lower rungs.
94

  

 

In his 1755 book Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens Kant 

had displayed the same penchant for dubious scientific reasoning, uncritical 

adoption of other material and wild speculation that was to characterize his 

geography lectures beginning the next year. In particular, Kant speculates on 

the inhabitants of Mercury and Venus, suggesting that their bodily 

constitution is such that they could not dwell on earth. In addition those 

planets like earth and Mars are midway in the planetary system and therefore 

their inhabitants are balanced, whereas those of Mercury and Venus are 

stupid, weak, unable to submit to justice, and coarse in body.
95

 As David Clark 

suggests, this ‘functions as a barely displaced allegory of Europe’s close 

encounters with Africa and other equatorial regions of the universe’.
96

 This 

text might be considered as an early work, unimportant and tangential to 

Kant’s mature philosophical edifice. The same cannot be said of the lectures 

on geography, which extended until his retirement, and, from the available 

transcripts never ceased to discuss race and racial ideas. 

 

Harvey is right to suggest that there is much material that is offensive, 

embarrassing and irrelevant in the lectures, and makes a compelling case for 

the difficulties in accepting Kant’s ethical views in their wake. These views 



 

 
20 

cannot be swept away, disassociated from the thought people want to 

salvage. In Harvey’s account, there is a direct linkage between the expression 

of these ideas and the philosophical architecture erected on top of the 

Weltkenntnis. Harvey is right that the responses of traditional Kantians are 

inadequate, but over recent years there has been the beginning of some 

interest in these issues. While there are a number of Kantians who remain in 

denial, both on race and Geography, there are others who have risen to a 

challenge to think both in the context of his work as a whole. In part this has 

been a by-product of important studies of the Anthropology, but more 

generally there are now philosophers who have taken Kant’s geography 

seriously, which is not to say uncritically.  

 

Louden is a good example of this tendency. He stresses the teleological 

aspects of Kant’s theory of race, which implies that ‘racial characteristics are 

present in the human species because they help us reach our collective 

destiny’,
97

 that is they come out depending on climatic and landscape 

features—a form of geographical determinism. What this means is that Kant is 

arguing for a theory of race as monogenetic rather than polygenetic, as 

proposed by contemporaries, such as Lord Kames in 1774. Kames suggested 

that different races were different species, from different origins, whereas 

monogenism is the belief that humans are all ultimately related, stemming 

from some common ancestor. While more traditional biblical accounts stress 

monogenism—based on the lineage through Adam—accounts at the time 

began to stress the distinctions of the races. Kant thus believes in the 

ultimate unity of the human species, rather than being like those racial 

thinkers who thought that different origins implied inequality.
98

 But this is not 

to defend Kant, as he did say some deeply unpleasant things about race, 

which in Louden’s balanced judgment means that earlier views—such as that 

of Ernst Cassirer that Kant was progressive, ‘humanitarian’ and ‘equalitarian’, 

and distinct from Gobineau—need to be discarded.
99

 For Louden, ‘not all of 

Kant’s ideas about race are entirely ‘humanitarian’ and ‘equalitarian’, and the 



 

 
21 

gap between Gobineau and Kant is unfortunately not always as wide as one 

would like it to be’.
100

 

 

Given the way that race is the link between the Anthropology and the 

Geography, its minimal role in the former is perhaps somewhat surprising.101 

As Wilson suggests, ‘the anthropology begins where physical geography ends; 

the different climates and environments, explored in physical geography, 

explain the different kinds of human beings in the world, but the inner germs 

and natural predispositions, explored in anthropology, explain why the human 

being can adapt itself to the different climates and environments’.
102

 Indeed, 

Kant separated out from the Physical Geography course much of what he calls 

‘moral geography’, that is that which concerns the ‘customs and characters’ of 

different peoples.
103

 But in the published version of the Anthropology Kant 

says little, and suggests that the observations on the relation of physiognomy 

to race ‘belong more to physical geography than pragmatic anthropology’.
104

 

He does say more in the Geography. This has led Louden to propose the 

intriguing possibility that the older Kant may have come to doubt some of his 

views on race, which is why they are so brief in the Anthropology, which he 

edited, and more extensive in the Geography, based on older materials and 

not edited until Kant was too old to proofread the manuscript.
105

 But as 

Louden notes, there is not the evidence to determine this, and those 

materials Kant did publish on race (from 1775, 1777, 1785 and 1788) tend to 

confirm the worst.
106

 Suggesting that it was after the 1788 essay he changed 

his mind is the last resort, with Kleingeld arguing that Kant changed his views 

in the 1790s, and probably after 1792.
107

 But we should note that the 1798 

edition of the Anthropology makes reference to Christoph Girtanner’s Über 

das Kantische Prinzip für die Naturgeschichte, a work he saw as ‘presented so 

beautifully and thoroughly… (in accordance with my principles)’.
108

 

 

Thus Kant’s politics are rendered deeply suspect. For geographers this may 

appear relatively unimportant in itself—Kant is hardly alone in the tradition for 

this—but the contemporary resonances are hard to escape. Yet while almost 



 

 
22 

anyone today would share his rejection of the lectures’ reactionary attitudes, 

this does not mean that the lectures are without value. Geographers have 

long tried to separate the discipline and its questions from its imperial legacy 

and the answers from that time and space. Indeed, it is precisely because we 

need to trace political ruptures that we need to think historically. 

 

Space: Reassessing Kant’s Geography 

 

It is another rupture that may lead to the more important critique: that while 

we think we know Kant’s view of space, the account Kant offers of space in 

the work on geography and, more importantly, elsewhere, is at odds with this 

received wisdom. Thus this final section moves beyond the Geography to 

begin to reassess Kant’s geography more generally. Kant’s position within the 

discipline of geography is too often reduced to a caricature, again more often 

cited than read.  

 

Kant, it is generally supposed, held a view of space that was totalising, based 

on Cartesian geometry, absolute in the Newtonian sense. Thus we find a 

range of adjectival pairings common: Kantian space is Cartesian, Newtonian, 

and sometimes even more ahistorically Euclidean. Certainly in Kant’s Critique 

of Pure Reason, in the section on the transcendental aesthetic, space and 

time are pure intuitions, effectively hardwired into our brains, our very way of 

perceiving the world, rather than attributes of it. Space and time are thus the 

way that we experience, forms of sensibility, not experienced as such. The 

relation of this to Descartes’ and Newton’s view of the material world is more 

complicated than a simple equation, but this is certainly not an open system. 

 

Nonetheless Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his mature views on space 

were explicitly directed at challenging a pure Newtonian conception of space. 

To assert this does not mean that Kant’s view of space is something that 

geographers today would want to, or should, adopt. But they should surely 

know better what they are arguing against. His earlier writings had been 



 

 
23 

closer to a relational view, much influenced by Leibniz. But Kant’s critical turn 

is not entirely against this perspective. As noted above, Kant’s mature views 

on space were first presented in his 1770 Inaugural Dissertation, and here he 

attempts to mediate between a Leibnizian relative view of space—space is a 

product of the relations between things—and a Newtonian absolute view—

space is the container for things.
109

  

 

Back in 1969, in Explanation in Geography,
110

 Harvey discussed Kant in a 

rather different register to his more recent work on the question of race and 

cosmopolitanism. Then, as now, Harvey is deeply suspect of Kant’s absolute 

view of space. Harvey suggests that the absolute view of space needs to be 

understood, but alongside it we also need to view and understand space as 

relative and relational. Even given the caveat above, Kant might seem to be a 

long way from that position. But Harvey in Explanation in Geography offers 

what might be an intriguing possibility. This is when he suggests that Kant’s 

view of space is one in which ‘spatial magnitude is… only a measure of the 

intensity of acting forces exerted by the substance’.
111

 Harvey then concludes 

his analysis: 

 

Such a view of space is contrary to the view on which Kant 

based his philosophy of geography. Thus space is no longer 

something which can encompass our perceptions of the world. 

It is, rather, a collection of measures determined by our 

perceptions. If space and matter can no longer be effectively 

separated and if the properties of space can no longer be 

regarded as given a priori, the logical justification for the 

particular view of geography adopted by Kant, Hettner, and 

Hartshorne, can no longer be sustained.
112

 

 

Harvey’s source for the view of Kant on ‘spatial magnitude’ is Max Jammer’s 

important study Concepts of Space. In the quotation from Jammer, the 

analysis is of Kant’s 1755 and 1756 writings. Jammer actually provides a 



 

 
24 

nuanced account of how Kant moved from a more Leibnizian view in those 

earlier works, to a more Newtonian view around 1769, under the influence of 

Leonhard Euler.
113

 In 1769 Kant tries to show that ‘absolute space, 

independent of the existence of all matter and as itself the ultimate 

foundation of the compound character of matter, has a reality of its own’.
114

 

Kant thus moved, on this account, from a relative view of space to an 

absolute one. But he does not rest there. As Jammer convincingly claims, 

Kant further worked on the view of space that he held, and by the Inaugural 

Dissertation of 1770 he had reached a different view, attempting to reconcile 

these positions. 

 

The concepts of absolute space and absolute time are 

considered to be mere conceptual fictions, a mental scheme of 

coexistence and sequence among sense particulars. Not itself 

arising out of sensations, the concept of space is a pure 

intuition, neither objective nor real, but subjective and ideal.
115

 

 

This therefore forms the view of space that is well known in Kant, where 

there are two pure intuitions—space and time—that structure all that we 

experience about the world. In Jammer’s words, space ‘is not an object of 

perception, it is a mode of perceiving objects’.
116

 

 

Briefly, and necessarily crudely, a return to the Critique of Pure Reason is 

helpful here. Kant suggests that space is an object of outer sense, and time of 

inner sense.
117

 Space then is as geography is, an element of the external 

world alone, whereas time is both of the external and internal.
118

 Kant then 

poses the questions he aims to address: 

 

Now what are space and time? Are they actual entities? Are they 

only determinations or relations of things, yet ones that would 

pertain to them even if they were not intuited, or are they 

relations that only attach to the form of intuition alone, and thus 



 

 
25 

to the subjective constitution of our mind, without which these 

predicates could not be ascribed to any thing at all.
119

 

 

Kant then suggests that space must be understood as a representation, thus 

leading him to talk of a representation of space. It is a priori, prior to 

experience, and the necessary condition for it, ‘the ground of all intuitions… 

the condition of possibility of appearances, not as a determination dependent 

on them’.
120

 In a marginal note he added that ‘space is not a concept, but an 

intuition’.
121

 It is in this sense, and this sense alone, that time is ‘something 

real, namely the real form of inner intuition’.
122

 In another note Kant adds a 

crucial addition: ‘So is space. This proves that here a reality (consequently 

also individual intuition) is given, which yet always grounds the reality as a 

thing. Space and time do not belong to the reality of things, but only to our 

representations’.
123

 

 

In the first edition (1781) the point about magnitude is therefore the reverse 

of the earlier claim cited by Harvey from Jammer. Kant claims that ‘space is 

represented as a given infinite magnitude. A general concept of space can 

determine nothing in respect to magnitude’.
124

 In the second edition (1787) 

he slightly alters the formulation: ‘Space is represented as an infinite given 

magnitude… Therefore the original representation of space is an a priori 

intuition, not a concept’.
125

 This leads to the essentially important claim: ‘we 

can accordingly speak of space, extended beings, and so on, only from the 

human standpoint’.
126

 A separate 1786 essay on orientation, that is literally, 

finding the sunrise in the sky, Kant notes that ‘even with all the objective data 

of the sky, I orient myself geographically only through a subjective ground of 

differentiation’.
127

 Space and time are thus not absolute in anything like a 

Newtonian sense, nor does Cartesian geometry tell us about the world as it is. 

Rather they are modes of access to the way the world appears to us. Kant 

therefore concludes in a note to his own edition: ‘space and time of course 

have objective reality, but not for what pertains to things outside of their 



 

 
26 

relation to a faculty of cognition, but rather only in relation to it, and thus to 

the form of sensibility, hence solely as appearances’.
128

 

 

Several points emerge from this. One is that Kant’s view of space (and time) 

undergoes some important developments, and that we need to be careful in 

taking claims in, and about, certain periods, as indicative of his thought as a 

whole. The second is that the Geography, given over several decades, is in 

part affected by these shifts. Preliminary investigations of the student 

transcripts indicate this: the Holstein-Beck from 1758-59 contains no 

theoretical discussion of space and time and their relation to geography and 

history; the courses from the mid 1770s have the more extensive introductory 

discussion drawn upon above (such as Kähler, which is the basis for the Rink 

edition introduction); whereas a course from the last years, such as the 

Wolter transcript from 1796, underplays the theoretical material but assumes 

its essential insights. Third, and most important, that Kant’s mature view—the 

one that emerges in 1770 and is the view of the Critique of Pure Reason, and  

arguably that of the majority of the geography lectures, is not an absolute 

view of space on the model of Descartes or Newton.
129

 The claim that Kant 

makes is that space, as this ‘conceptual fiction’, offers a way of insight into 

how we perceive the world, and is open to scientific examination, rather than 

this determination being necessarily representative of space itself. In many 

places Kant recognises that directions in space are a product of our body’s 

encounter with space rather than absolute and self-evident.  

 

In addition, as the work on space and time in the Geography indicates, Kant 

is trying to work the dimensions of space and time together. Kant surely does 

not advance the kind of historical-geographical materialism advocated by the 

likes of Harvey, or the ‘spatial history’ other geographers have suggested. But 

his separation of space and time is a product of theorising, when in practice—

either in our experience or in the relation of geographical details to historical 

studies—they are continually intertwined. 

 



 

 
27 

Conclusion 

 

Given the renewed interest in the Anthropology and the links this material has 

to the Geography, and the forthcoming translation of these lectures in the 

volume on Natural Science this seems an opportune moment to take stock of 

their historical importance and contemporary relevance. To read Kant’s work 

on geography is an inherently interdisciplinary venture, since they cover both 

human and physical geography and obviously relate to philosophical concerns. 

The issues raised by these texts of Kant’s are textual and linguistic, 

philological and hermeneutic, philosophical and political, even as we consider 

their relation to geography and the wider history of ideas. Only a multi-

disciplinary, and multi-handed, approach can do justice to their complexity.
130

 

For geographers these lectures have some fundamental challenges to offer. 

Most of it is indeed, as Hartshorne, following Adickes, suggested, of historical 

interest. This is the very reason why it is so interesting. If nothing else, this 

account offered here is to show just how many difficulties there are around 

the texts of Kant’s geographies and their meanings. The link to the 

anthropology lectures and the question of race is a fundamental concern, 

precisely because it is so deeply problematic, and because of the challenge 

Bernasconi and Harvey have thrown down to geographers and others who 

wish to appeal to Kant’s cosmopolitan instincts. More positively, and in part 

going beyond the Geography itself, there may be something of fundamental 

interest in the thinking of the relation between space and time, geography 

and history. This is not to co-opt Kant into arguments for the primacy of 

geography over history, nor for claims of their equal status in the study of 

social relations, but rather to recognise that the tradition of Western thought 

has not always had the imbalance it is often assumed to have had.  

 

The argument made here could easily be extended to suggest that the other 

important geographical issues, such as the relation between the human and 

the environment, and the link or distinction between the human and nature, 

might also be profitably be rethought from the perspective of a closer 



 

 
28 

engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole.
131

 It seems 

unquestionable, however, that a more nuanced understanding of these 

lectures and Kant’s work more generally can only be a good thing for the 

history of the discipline of geography. 

 

References 

 

Works available in English translation are generally referenced to the 

Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation, which 

unfortunately does not have volume numbers. References are therefore given 

to volumes independently. References to the Critique of Pure Reason are 

given to the standard A/B pagination of the first and second editions.  

 

For works not in English translation references are to the Akademie Ausgabe 

of Kants gesammelte Schriften, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900ff, referred to 

by KGS, and followed by volume number and page. The Physische Geographie 

appears in Vol IX: Logik, Physische Geographie, Pädagogik. 

 

Student transcripts are quoted from the versions produced by Werner Stark, 

to whom I am extremely grateful for his kind access to as yet unpublished 

materials.  

 

Acknowledgments 

 

This paper was written as part of a project funded by a Leverhulme Research 

Fellowship and a British Academy Conference Grant. This support is gratefully 

acknowledged. Along with Eduardo Mendieta I organised workshops on Kant’s 

Geography in New York in November 2007 and Durham in January 2008, and 

I gave a version of this paper in Uppsala in May 2008. I am grateful to the 

workshop participants and audiences for instructive discussions. I would also 

like to thank Felix Driver and three anonymous referees for Journal of 

Historical Geography for their comments on this paper. 



 

 
29 

 

Notes 

 
1
  R. Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current 

Thought in the Light of the Past, Annals of the Association of American 

Geographers 29 (1939) 173-412; 29 (1939) 413-658. This was 

reprinted in book form under the same title (Lancaster PA, 1939) to 

which all references are made. See also Hartshorne, The Concept of 

Geography as a Science of Space, from Kant and Humboldt to Hettner, 

Annals of the Association of American Geographers 48 (1958) 97-108; 

Richards, Kant’s Geography and Mental Maps, Transactions of the 

Institute of British Geographers 61 (1974) 1-16; and M. Bowen, 

Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to 

Alexander von Humboldt, Cambridge University Press, 1981.  

2
  J. A. May, Kant’s Concept of Geography and its Relation to Recent 

Geographical Thought, Toronto, 1970. One of the rare exceptions 

among contemporary geographers has been David N. Livingstone, who 

discusses Kant in the context of his impact on the discipline of 

geography in The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a 

Contested Enterprise, Oxford, 1992 113-7; and in D. N. Livingstone 

and R. T. Harrison, Immanuel Kant, Subjectivism and Human 

Geography: A Preliminary Investigation, Transactions of the Institute of 

British Geographers 6 (1981) 359-74. The other exception is David 

Harvey, whose reading is more extensively discussed below. Kant’s 

work only receives the briefest of mentions in physical geography 

surveys. See, for example, M. J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of 

Time: The Reconstitution of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, 

Chicago, 2005; and R. Inkpen, Science, Philosophy and Physical 

Geography, London, 2005. The treatment is little better in G. J. Martin 

and P. E. James, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas, 

New York, Third Edition, 1993, 109-11. 



 

 
30 

 
3
  I. Kant, Natural Science, edited by H. B. Nisbet and E. Watkins, 

Cambridge, forthcoming. The translation of the Physische Geographie 

is by Olaf Reinhardt, who has kindly sent me an advance copy of the 

text. 

4
  R. L. Bolin, Immanuel Kant’s Physical Geography, MA Thesis, University 

of Indiana, 1968. The first six sections of the introduction also appear 

in May, Kant’s Concept of Geography, 255-64. 

5
  Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography, 39. 

6
  Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition, 101. 

7
  Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography, 44; endorsed by Livingstone, 

The Geographical Tradition, 115. C. Glacken, in Traces on the Rhodian 

Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to 

the End of the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley, 1967, 530-5, similarly 

shifts the focus to other texts, in his case largely the beginning of the 

second part of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (edited and 

translated by P. Guyer, Cambridge, 2000). 

8
  Though these figures differ in various accounts, I have taken them 

from the archival work of Werner Stark (http://www.staff.uni-

marburg.de/~stark/geograph/geo_start.htm) and Steve Naragon 

(http://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesGe

ography.htm). 

9
  It is important to note that though the anthropology lectures were 

edited by Kant himself, they too exist in different forms. Indeed, KGS 

XXV is devoted to variant drafts; selections from which are forthcoming 

in the Cambridge Edition as Lectures on Anthropology, edited by A. W. 

Wood and R. B. Louden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Kant’s also wrote a large number of reflections on anthropology, 

collected in KGS XV (2 parts). For a discussion see W. Stark, Historical 

http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~stark/geograph/geo_start.htm
http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~stark/geograph/geo_start.htm
http://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesGeography.htm
http://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Notes/notesGeography.htm


 

 
31 

 

Notes and Interpretative Questions, in: B. Jacobs and P. Kain (Eds), 

Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, Cambridge, 2003, 15-37. 

10
  M. Kuehn, Introduction, in: I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic 

Point of View, edited and translated by R. B. Louden, Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2006, x, citing F. W. Schubert, Immanuel 

Kants Biographie zum grossen Theil nach handschriftlichen Nachrichten 

dargestellt, Leipzig, 1842, 154. 

11
  Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 6 n. 

12
  Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 6 n. 

13
  Immanuel Kants Physische Geographie, edited by G. Vollmer, Mainz, 

Four Volumes in Seven Parts, 1801-05. The transcripts Vollmer used 

are lost. For Kant’s repudiation of this edition, see Nachricht, die den 

Vollmer erschienene unrechtmäßige Ausgabe der physische Geographie 

betreffend, 29
th
 May 1801, KGS XII, 372, and E. Adickes, German 

Kantian Bibliography, New York, 1970 [1893-96], 27. There is some 

dispute about the validity of this refutation, given Kant’s advanced age 

and senility when it came out. I owe this point to Robert Bernasconi. 

14
  Immanuel Kant’s Physische Geographie, edited by F. T. Rink, 

Königsberg, 1802, here cited by the KGS edition. On the provenance of 

the 1802 edition see Friedrich Theodor Rink, Vorrede des 

Herausgebers, in KGS IX, 153-5; Richards, Kant’s Geography and 

Mental Maps; and especially W. Stark, Immanuel Kants physische 

Geographie – eine Herausforderung?, 4
th
 May 2001, 

http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~stark/ws_lese4.htm 

15
  Rink, Vorrede des Herausgebers, KGS IX, 155. 

16
  E. Adickes, Untersuchungen zu Kants physischer Geographie, 

Tübingen, 1911, 278; Zu O. Schöndörffesrs Bemerkungen über Kants 

physische Geographie, Altpreußische Monatsschrift 56 (1919) 55-71, 

http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~stark/ws_lese4.htm


 

 
32 

 

59. P. D. Fenves describes Adickes’s Untersuchungen as ‘one of the 

great monuments of Kant philology’ (Late Kant: Towards Another Law 

of the Earth, New York, 2003, 202 n. 10). May suggests the first half 

dates from 1772 or 73, and claims that it represents Kant’s mature 

thought (Kant’s Concept of Geography, 72, 75).  

17
  Stark, Immanuel Kants physische Geographie. An unpublished analysis 

by Stark compares the Rink edited introduction with the manuscript, 

showing line by line just how much interpretation was involved. 

18
  Rink, Vorrede des Herausgebers. 

19
  It also appeared in other editions, notably I. Kant, Sämmtliche Werke 

Sechster Theil: Schriften zur Physischen Geographie, edited by K. 

Rosenkranz and F. W. Schubert, Leipzig, 1839. This volume also 

includes Kant’s writings on related topics, and an appendix of variants 

from Kant’s handwritten materials, 779-805. 

20
  C. Browne Garnett Jr., The Kantian Philosophy of Space, New York, 

1939, 11 (see 119) claims that Kant ‘formulated the main tenets of his 

philosophy of space’ in 1769, a belief supported by A. Melnick, Space, 

Time, and Thought in Kant, Dordrecht, 1989, 25, and J. H. Zammito, 

Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, Chicago, 2002, 264. The 

reference is to the developed views found in the Inaugural Dissertation 

On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, in 

Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, edited and translated by David 

Walford, Cambridge, 1992, especially 395-8. 

21
  F. K. Schaefer, Exceptionalism in Geography: A Methodological 

Examination, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 43 

(1953) 226-249, 233-4 makes a similar point, although based on the 

view that the introduction to the Geography dates from 1756. This is of 

course not to denigrate valuable work that takes the ‘pre-critical’ 

philosophy as its object of study. On this dating in Kant’s work and its 



 

 
33 

 

relation to the anthropology, see Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth 

of Anthropology, 255-9. 

22
  This will include the Holstein-Beck manuscript from 1758-59, several 

from the 1770-1792 period, as well as introductions from several other 

years and an appendix of J.G. Herder’s notes from Kant’s courses on 

logic, moral philosophy, metaphysics and physical geography. See W. 

Stark, Immanuel Kant, Physische Geographie: Kurze Information zur 

Neuausgabe, unpublished paper; and see http://www.staff.uni-

marburg.de/~stark/geograph/geo_edi0.htm  

23
  See I. Kant, Notes and Fragments, edited by P. Guyer, translated by C. 

Bowman, P. Guyer, and F. Rauscher, Cambridge, 2005, 547 n. 34. 

Unfortunately this volume does not include any of the notes on 

geography, which appear in KGS XIV, 541-635. A detailed analysis is 

provided in the work of Adickes, Untersuchungen zu Kants physischer 

Geographie; and Ein neu aufegefundenes Kollegheft nach Kants 

Vorlesing über physische Geographie, Tübingen, 1913. See Stark, 

Immanuel Kants physische Geographie. 

24
  The Louden translation of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 

is cited above (n. 8); the earlier translations are by M. J. Gregor, The 

Hague, 1974; and by V. L. Dowdell, Carbondale, 1978. References to 

this work are to the Louden translation.  

25
  I. Kant, Anthropology, History and Education, edited by R. B. Louden 

and G. Zöller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Lectures 

on Anthropology. 

26
  See Stark, Immanuel Kants physische Geographie; and material on his 

website. 

27
  I. Kant, Géographie, translated by M. Cohen-Halimi, M. Marcuzzi and V. 

Seroussi, Paris, 1999. The appendix is taken from Kant, Sämmtliche 

http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~stark/geograph/geo_edi0.htm
http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~stark/geograph/geo_edi0.htm


 

 
34 

 

Werke (note 19 above). See also M. Marcuzzi, L’écriture de l’espace: 

Récit historique et description géographique dans la Géographie 

Physique de Kant, in: J. Benoist and F. Merlini (Eds), Historicité et 

spatialité: Le problème de l’espace dans la pensée contemporaine, 

Paris, 2001, 118-39. 

28
  See H. Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, Oxford, 1995, 214-5; H. Holzhey and 

V. Mudroch, Historical Dictionary of Kant and Kantianism, Lanham, 

2002, 131-2. 

29
  G. Bird (Ed) A Companion to Kant, Oxford, 2006. 

30
  E. Watkins (Ed) Kant and the Sciences, Oxford, 2001. 

31
  R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, Oxford, 2006, 56-7, 268-

70. 

32
  Other examples of the neglect are given by C. W. J. Withers, Kant’s 

Geography in Comparative Perspective, in: S. Elden and E. Mendieta 

(Eds), Reading Kant’s Geography, Albany, forthcoming 2009.  

33
  See, for example, Browne Garnett Jr., The Kantian Philosophy of 

Space; Melnick, Space, Time, and Thought in Kant; H. Sidgwick, Kant’s 

‘Exposition’ of Space and Time, in Immanuel Kant: Critical 

Assessments, edited by R. F. Chadwick and C. Cazeaux, London, 1992, 

Four Volumes, I 89-102; and M. D. Newman, The Unity of Time and 

Space, and its Role in Kant’s Doctrine of A Priori Synthesis, in 

Immanuel Kant: Critical Assessments, II, 185-200. 

34
  See M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, translated by 

R. Taft, Bloomington 1997. Foucault translated the Anthropology as 

Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, Paris 1964. This edition 

includes only a brief Notice historique, which is all that was published 

of Foucault’s secondary thesis on the Anthropology. See M. Foucault, 

Introduction à l’Anthropologie de Kant, Thèse complémentaire pour le 



 

 
35 

 

doctorat dès letters, 1961; now translated by R. Nigro and K. Briggs as 

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 

New York, 2008. Foucault does not discuss the work on geography.  

35
  H. L. Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology: Its Origin, Meaning and 

Critical Significance, Albany, 2006, 17; Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the 

Birth of Anthropology, 293. 

36
  B. Erdmann, Zur Geschichte des Textes, in I. Kant, Reflexionen Kants 

zur kritischen Philosophie, edited by B. Erdmann, Stuttgart-Bad 

Cannstatt, 1992 [1882] 31-64. 

37
  Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 3; see R. B. Louden, Kant’s 

Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings, Oxford, 2000, 

62-3. 

38
  Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, 215. 

39
  Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, especially 57-

59, 284-96. 

40
  Jacobs and Kain (Eds), Essays on Kant’s Anthropology. 

41
  M. Kuehn, Kant: A Biography, Cambridge, 2001; E. Förster, Kant’s Final 

Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum, Cambridge, 2000; 

Fenves, Late Kant. This is the case despite the fact that these works do 

not treat the Geography in any detail themselves. 

42
  Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 9. 

43
  Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 8. 

44
  Zammito, Kant Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 285-6. 

45
  Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 65; see Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic 

Anthropology, 20. 



 

 
36 

 
46

  Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 95. 

47
  KGS II, 443. 

48
  See Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 20, 113-5. 

49
  KGS IX, 156-7; see Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.  

50
  I. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, in Religion and Rational Theology, 

translated and edited by A. W. Wood and G. Di Giovanni, Cambridge, 

1996, 256. 

51
  KGS IX, 157. The phrase ‘description of the earth’ is Rink’s 

interpolation. As B. Jacobs (Kantian Character and the Science of 

Humanity, in: Jacobs and Kain (Eds), Essays on Kant’s Anthropology 

105-134, 132 n. 49) notes, in Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysic of 

Morals, the same role is played by physics. 

52
  Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology 5, 115. 

53
  KGS II, 312. 

54
  KGS II, 443. See also the remarks in §70 of the Education lectures, 

cited by May, Kant’s Concept of Geography, 132. 

55
  KGS IX, 158. 

56
  KGS XXV, 470, 733, cited in Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 95. 

57
  KGS II, 443. 

58
  Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics 184-5 n. 6, drawing on K. Vörlander, 

Immanuel Kants Leben, Leipzig, 1911, 41-3. 

59
  The quote and this information come from 

http://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Lectures/lecture

sListDiscipline.htm#geography. See G. H. Millar, The New and 

Universal System of Geography, London, 1782. 

http://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Lectures/lecturesListDiscipline.htm#geography
http://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Kant/Lectures/lecturesListDiscipline.htm#geography


 

 
37 

 
60

  In relation to geography, see Livingstone and Harrison, Immanuel 

Kant, Subjectivism and Human Geography; Withers, Kant’s Geography 

in Comparative Perspective; and M. Church, Immanuel Kant and the 

Emergence of Modern Geography, in: Elden and Mendieta (Eds), 

Reading Kant’s Geography. In relation to the natural sciences more 

generally, see P. R. Sloan, Preforming the Categories: Eighteenth-

Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant’s A Priori, 

Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002) 229–253; and his Kant 

on the History of Nature: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Critical 

Philosophy for Natural History, Studies in History and Philosophy of 

Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2006) 627–648. 

61
  On the geographical aspect alongside the temporal in determining 

geographical knowledge, see Withers, Kant’s Geography in 

Comparative Perspective; and more broadly his Placing the 

Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason, 

Chicago, 2007. This is one of the key arguments of D. N. Livingstone, 

Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, 

Chicago, 2003. 

62
  See Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, 178; Church, Immanuel Kant 

and the Emergence of Modern Geography. 

63
  Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, 183-4; Livingstone, The 

Geographical Tradition, 108-9. 

64
  KGS IX, 298. 

65
  KGS IX, 163. 

66
  Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, 178; Kant’s Geography in 

Comparative Perspective. 

67
  Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1775-1770, 298-9; KGS II, 312-3, 

translation modified. 



 

 
38 

 
68

  KGS IX, 160-1, 164-65. Rink changes the order of their first 

presentation, adding ‘literary geography’ (KGS IX, 161) which is not in 

the 1774 transcript or in the fuller elaboration. He also adds detail to 

the elaboration, usually based on material later delivered in the 

lectures themselves. Some of the changes—’civil society’ for ‘society’ or 

the replacement of ‘Handlungs Geographie’ with ‘merkantilische 

Geographie’—are more interpretative. May claims that ‘his concept of 

the limits and scope of geography is inevitably much broader than any 

contemporary concept can reasonably be’ (Kant’s Concept of 

Geography, 153). 

69
  Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology 11, 14. 

70
  Church, Immanuel Kant and the Emergence of Modern Geography; 

Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought, 208. 

71
  I. Kant, Lectures on Logic, translated and edited by J. M. Young, 

Cambridge, 1992, 538. The first three questions appear in Critique of 

Pure Reason, translated by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, Cambridge: 

1998, A805/B853. 

72
  Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 4. 

73
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A840/B868.  

74
  KGS IX, 156; see Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 24. 

75
  Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics. S. Kofman (The Economy of Respect: 

Kant and Respect for Women, translated by N. Fisher, in Feminist 

Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, R. M. Schott (Ed), University Park, 

1997, 355-72, 357) has similarly argued that the Anthropology can be 

seen as an ‘addendum or appendix’ to the work on virtue. 

76
  Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 233-55; see Glacken, Traces 

on the Rhodian Shore, 530-5. 



 

 
39 

 
77

  I. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, translated by M. 

Friedman, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, edited by H. Allison 

and P. Heath, Cambridge, 2002, 181-270. See also May, Kant’s 

Concept of Geography, 148 which schematises Kant’s Classification of 

Sciences. 

78
  I. Kant, Opus Postumum, edited by E. Förster, translated by E. Förster 

and M. Rosen, Cambridge, 1993, especially 10-22; Förster, Kant’s Final 

Synthesis, 1. 

79
  KGS IX, 159-60, 162. For a criticism of this division, see Schaefer, 

Exceptionalism in Geography. 

80
  KGS IX, 159. This is especially the case for someone who travelled as 

little as Kant, though his location in the port city of Königsberg meant 

he had a wider range of contacts than is generally assumed. See 

Kuehn, Kant: A Biography. 

81
  KGS IX, 159. Orography and hydrography—the description of 

mountains and water—are also mentioned as divisions in Rink’s edition, 

but not in the transcript. 

82
  Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 10. 

83
  R. Bernasconi, Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the 

Enlightenment Construction of Race, in Bernasconi (Ed), Race, London, 

2001, 11-36; Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism, in Philosophers 

on Race: Critical Essays, edited by J. K. Ward and T. L. Lott, Oxford, 

2002, 145-66; and Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up: The Challenge 

of Enlightenment Racism to the Study of the History of Philosophy, 

Radical Philosophy 117 (2003) 13-22. See also the exchange between 

Bernasconi and J. McCarney in Radical Philosophy 199 (2003) 32-7, 

which, while focused on Hegel, discusses the key issues. See also E. C. 

Eze, Kant, in: Eze (Ed) Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical 



 

 
40 

 

Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997 103-40. Also important is David Farrell 

Krell, ‘The Bodies of Black Folk: From Kant and Hegel to Du Bois and 

Baldwin’, boundary 2 27 No 3, 2000 103-34; and more generally his 

The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God: 

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 

84
  Bernasconi, Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism, 147; see ‘Who 

Invented the Concept of Race?’. 

85
  R. Bernasconi, Introduction, in Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth 

Century, edited by R. Bernasconi, London, Eight Volumes, Volume One, 

2001, viii. 

86
  Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up, 19. 

87
  For an account along these lines, see T. E. Hill and B. Boxill, Kant and 

Race, in Boxill (Ed), Race and Racism, Oxford, 2001, 448-71. 

88
  Bernasconi, Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up, 22. 

89
  R. Bernasconi, Introduction, in: Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (Ed), Race 

and Racism in Continental Philosophy, Bloomington, 2003 1-7, 2; see 

Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up, 20, 25. 

90
  D. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils, 

Public Culture 12 (2000), 529-64; and Geographical 

Knowledges/Political Powers, Proceedings of the British Academy 122 

(2004) 87-115. These themes are also central to his forthcoming 

Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, New York 2008. 

91
  Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils, 532. 

92
  Erdmann, Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte von Kants Anthropologie, in 

Kant, Reflexionen Kants zur kritischen Philosophie, 68. I have taken the 

translation from R. B. Louden, The Second Part of Morals, in Jacobs 

and Kain (Eds), Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, 60-84, 60. 



 

 
41 

 
93

  Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils, 532. 

94
  KGS IX, 316. 

95
  I. Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, 

translated by S. L. Jaki. Edinburgh, 1981, 195. 

96
  D. L. Clark, Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others, CR: The 

New Centennial Review 1 (2001), 201-89, 258. 

97
  Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 97. 

98
  Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics 96-98; Bernasconi, Introduction, in 

Concepts of Race, viii-ix. For a more detailed discussion, see 

Bernasconi, Who Invented the Concept of Race?; Withers, Placing the 

Enlightenment, Chapter 7; and A. C. Cohen, Kant on Epigenesis, 

Monogenesis and Human Nature: The Biological Premises of 

Anthropology, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and 

Biomedical Sciences 36 (2006) 675-93, especially 681. 

99
  E. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, New Haven, 1946, 235. 

100
  Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 100. 

101
  Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 223-4.  

102
  Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 15. 

103
  KGS IX, 164. 

104
  Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 199; for a 

discussion see Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, 94-5. 

105
  Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics 207-8 n. 71. 

106
  Kant’s essays on race are collected in Concepts of Race in the 

Eighteenth Century, Volume Three. As Bernasconi notes there (Editor’s 

Note, vii-ix) the 1788 essay Über den Gebrauch teleologischer 



 

 
42 

 

Principien in der Philosophie, is an important step towards Kant’s third 

critique, the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment. 

107
  Pauline Kleingeld, Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race, The Philosophical 

Quarterly 57 (2007) 573-92. See also Fenves, Late Kant, 102-4, 111. A 

more useful, if problematic, account of the possibilities of Kant is found 

in S. Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, Princeton, 2003. 

108
  C. Girtanner, Über das Kantische Prinzip für die Naturgeschichte 

[1796], reprinted in Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century, 

Volume Seven; Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 

223. 

109
  One of the best geography accounts of this is in Richards, Kant’s 

Geography and Mental Maps. 

110
  D. Harvey, Explanation in Geography, London, 1969, 70-8, 207-10. 

111
  Harvey, Explanation in Geography, 212; citing M. Jammer, Concepts of 

Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, Cambridge, 1954, 

130. I have used the Third Edition (New York, 1993). The citation is 

from page 132 of this edition. 

112
  Harvey, Explanation in Geography, 212. In a more recent piece, Space 

as a Keyword, in: N. Castree and D. Gregory (Eds), David Harvey: A 

Critical Reader, Oxford, 2006 270-293, Harvey does not significantly 

depart from this view. 

113
  See Jammer, Concepts of Space, 131-2. 

114
  Kant, Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of 

Directions in Space, Theoretical Philosophy 1775-1770, 366. 

115
  Jammer, Concepts of Space, 134-5. 

116
  Jammer, Concepts of Space, 138. 



 

 
43 

 
117

  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A22-3/B37. 

118
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A34/B50. 

119
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A23/B37-8. 

120
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A24/B38-9. 

121
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, note to A23. 

122
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A37. 

123
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, note to A37. 

124
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A25. 

125
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B39-40. ‘Given’ and ‘a priori’ are in bold 

in the text. 

126
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A26/B42. 

127
  Kant, What Does it Mean to Orientate Oneself in Thinking? in Religion 

and Rational Theology, 9. 

128
  Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, note to A41. 

129
  Kant’s views on space are also amended in his Opus Postumum. For 

some instructive indications of where this might go, see J. Edwards, 

Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge, Berkeley, 2000, 

especially 173-4. 

130
  A forthcoming volume of essays (Elden and Mendieta (Eds), Reading 

Kant’s Geography) attempts to begin this process of interdisciplinary 

dialogue concerning the lectures. The book seeks to provide a range of 

essays discussing, contextualizing and criticizing Immanuel Kant’s work 

on geography; brings together scholars of geography, philosophy and 

related disciplines to allow a broad discussion of the importance of 

Kant’s text for philosophical and geographical work, both historically 



 

 
44 

 

and in the contemporary context; and seeks to deal with some of the 

complexities of this topic.  

131
  I owe the specific example to one of the anonymous referees.