Introduction, and Dedication to Karl Ameriks

Immanuel Kant is of course best known for his three great Critiques, and for the systematic philosophy that they inaugurate and ground—a monumental philosophical enterprise, and oeuvre, which has justly garnered extensive scholarly attention and ever-renewed philosophical reception. Kant initiated this systematic philosophical approach relatively late, however, after a decades-long career as a professional philosopher. The texts Kant wrote during that earlier phase of his career, prior to the Critique of Pure Reason—often referred to, somewhat dismissively, as the “pre-critical” writings—have received significantly less attention, perhaps in part because of Kant's self-portrayal in that first critical work. If he—and by extension his readers—is initiating, and undergoing himself, a revolution in thought, there may be no reason to attend to previous thought, which is now to be set aside or overturned. In recent years, however, scholars have increasingly questioned this narrative of rupture and of innovation de novo, and recognized the value of attending to Kant's early works, to see how they can shed light on important changes as well as continuities in Kant's thought, and indeed as proposing questions, positions, and arguments of independent interest.The essays in this special issue, each focusing on a different text or group of texts from the 1750s and 1760s, aim to contribute to and promote such attention to Kant's earlier works. They demonstrate the immense range of the young Kant's intellectual interests: from logic (treated by Daniel Heller-Roazen) and philosophical methodology (discussed by Francey Russell), to philosophical engagement with physics and earth sciences (treated respectively by James Messina and Stefanie Buchenau), to philosophical anthropology (discussed in different registers in the essays by Henry Southgate and Melissa Zinkin), to moral philosophical questions (treated by Samuel Fleischacker and Karl Ameriks). And they convey the rich variety of insights on such topics to be gleaned from the young Kant's works. In these texts, Kant is already preoccupied with many of his most characteristic questions and concerns, such as the foundation of morality, the possibility of metaphysics as a science, and the reconcilability of either with Newtonian physics. But, as James Messina shows in his deft treatment of the 1756 essay on Physical Monadology, Kant's early attempts to answer those questions can allow us to disentangle the various strands in the mature Kant's response. As Messina argues, this stage of Kant's thinking, of his struggles to articulate a metaphysics that would respect the achievements of Newtonian physics, reveals the distinctness, and to some degree separability, of Kant's later commitments concerning the nature of space and of material substance, of the epistemology and methods of physics, and of metaphysics. Or, as Daniel Heller-Roazen and Henry Southgate propose, investigation of these early texts can allow us to understand the theoretical motivations and underpinnings of later positions. Thus Heller-Roazen elegantly argues Kant's innovations in logic consist not per se in his examination of the “false subtleties” announced in the title of his sole published essay on formal logic, but rather in his recognition of the primacy of judgment or syllogism over conceptualization, and in an incipient awareness of the necessity of self-consciousness, even “inner sense,” for such judgment. And Southgate proposes that Kant's later racist theorizing, and its tension with Kant's moral egalitarianism, may be grounded in a longstanding tension, present already in Kant's early cosmological thought (in Universal Natural History), between two ways of conceiving of human minds: as fundamentally embodied and so ranked in accord with the affordances of their embodied conditions, on one hand, and as disembodied spirits and equal, on the other.As Samuel Fleischacker observes, in his discussion of Kant's Prize Essay of 1764, these early texts not only provide illuminating resources for understanding the argumentative moving pieces within or motivations for Kant's mature positions, but also contain distinctive points of their own. Fleischacker contends that we may discern an appealing “road not taken” in Kant's early reflections: that ethics may be oriented by a felt, rather than rational appreciation of the ends of human life as intrinsically valuable or, indeed, beautiful. (Fleischacker thus also suggests interesting continuities between this early position and Kant's later aesthetics.) Francey Russell's and Melissa Zinkin's contributions likewise open up new questions and dimensions in Kant's thought. In her reading of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Francey Russell articulates a new dimension to Kant's questions concerning the possibility or legitimacy of metaphysics (or much philosophical method generally): if metaphysics comprises clarification of obscure concepts, philosophers must be operating with concepts we do not quite understand, from which we may therefore make rather risky, wish-fulfilling inferences, and about which we must thus engage in sober self-examination. And Melissa Zinkin proposes that in his early thinking about optimism, Kant transposes the project of theodicy into an existential question, concerning whether one can find one's own existence valuable, from a first-personal point of view—a question that sheds new light on Kant's later prohibition of suicide and assertion that having a good will is necessary to justify human existence.More generally, in these texts written early in Kant's career, seen through the interpretive lenses directed at them by the contributors to this volume, Kant appears less as the great solitary thinker, elaborator of an encompassing system, as he sometimes has been understood and portrayed, and more as deeply responsive to and situated in a larger intellectual and historical context: absorbing and contributing to natural-scientific developments and ongoing philosophical discussions; taking a stance concerning the meaning and explanation of contemporaneous historical events (notably the Lisbon earthquake of 1755); reflecting upon our placement on the surface of the Earth, and upon his own philosophical practice and aims in the classroom. Perhaps more strikingly, in these works Kant endorses and values that situatedness, in ways that (our authors demonstrate) not only can transform understanding of Kant's mature thought, but also furnish a welcome perspective on our own philosophical practice. So, for example, as Karl Ameriks notes, the young Kant emphasizes that thinking for oneself—enlightenment or even autonomy—requires that one know physical geography and socio-political history, in order to understand the socio-material conditions for one's actions, but also the history of philosophy, to inculcate the reason that must guide and enact such thinking (see NEV, 2:310, 313). Or, as Stefanie Buchenau suggests, the young Kant's natural-scientific investigations take their bearings at once from pragmatic considerations of human life on Earth, and from an upward- and outward-looking, awed wonder at the Earth's placement within a larger, rationally intelligible cosmic system, which pragmatic-inspirational stance enjoins upon us a task of “home-maintenance” (Haushaltung) of our earthly abode.The papers collected in this issue are revised versions of presentations given at a conference on the Young Kant, held at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) in May 2025, and organized by myself and Peter Fenves in honor of the three-hundredth anniversary of Kant's birth. We were fortunate to assemble an intelligent, enthusiastic, and open-minded slate of speakers, including Karl Ameriks, an eminent scholar of Kant, German Idealism, and German Romanticism, who was characteristically engaged and congenial throughout, and especially supportive of all the younger scholars in the crowd—and, likewise characteristically, amused and delighted to be counted among the “Young Kantians.” Ameriks completed revision of his contribution to the present volume in spring 2025, only weeks before his death, and we dedicate this volume to him. While he made many significant and influential contributions to the study of all aspects of Kant's mature critical philosophy, his own approach to philosophy seems nicely echoed in that of the younger Kant as well: broad curiosity and wide learning; humane responsiveness both to the cultural, historical, scientific context and to the views of his comrades in inquiry; intellectual seriousness leavened by humility and a quirky sense of humor. Most of all, however, Ameriks was deeply Kantian in being committed at once to the intrinsic value of “philosophical studies” without regard for how “these studies might help people become more successful in various . . . materialistic ways,” and to the moral truth “that there is a fundamental level of virtue that can and should be achieved by everyone without relying on the world of scholarship” (quoting from his essay in the present volume). And he transcended Kant himself, perhaps, in demonstrating not only a Kantian respect for human dignity in all persons, but also a constant kindness. He will be much missed.