Stuart Elden & Eduardo Mendieta 
Reading Kant’s Geography 

For almost forty years, German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant gave lectures on geography, more than almost any other subject. Kant believed that geography and anthropology together provided knowledge of the world, an empirical ground for his thought. Above all, he thought that knowledge of the world was indispensable to the development of an informed cosmopolitan citizenry that would be self-ruling. While these lectures have received very little attention compared to his work on other subjects, they are an indispensable source of material and insight for understanding his work, specifically his thinking and contributions to anthropology, race theory, space and time, history, the environment and the emergence of a mature public. This indispensable volume brings together world-renowned scholars of geography, philosophy and related disciplines to offer a broad discussion of the importance of Kant’s work on this topic for contemporary philosophical and geographical work.

Spis treści

Acknowledgments



1. Reintroducing Kant’s Geography


Stuart Elden



I. The Invention of Geography: Kant and His Times



2. Immanuel Kant and the Emergence of Modern Geography


Michael Church



3. Kant’s
Geography in Comparative Perspective


Charles W. J. Withers




II. From a Lecture Course of Forty Years to a Book Manuscript: Textual Issues



4. Kant’s Lectures on “Physical Geography”: A Brief Outline of Its Origins, Transmission, and Development: 1754–1805


Werner Stark



5. Historical and Philological References on the Question of a Possible Hierarchy of Human “Races, ” “Peoples, ” or “Populations” in Immanuel Kant—A Supplement.


Werner Stark



6. Translating Kant’s
Physical Geography: Travails and Insights into Eighteenth Century Science (and Philosophy)


Olaf Reinhardt



7. Writing Space: Historical Narrative and Geographical Description in Kant’s
Physical Geography


Max Marcuzzi




III. Towards a Cosmopolitan Education: Geography and Anthropology



8. “The Play of Nature”: Human Beings in Kant’s
Geography


Robert Louden



9. The Pragmatic Use of Kant’s Physical Geography Lectures


Holly Wilson



10. The Place of the Organism in Kantian Philosophy: Geography, Teleology, and the Limits of Philosophy


David Morris




IV. Kant’s Geography of Reason: Reason and Its Spatiality



11. Kant’s Geography of Reason


Jeff Malpas and Karsten Thiel



12 Orientation in Thinking: Geographical Problems, Political Solutions


Onora O’Neill



13 “The Unity of All Places on the Face of the Earth”: Original Community, Acquisition, and Universal Will in Kant’s Doctrine of Right


Jeffrey Edwards




V. Gender, Race, History, and Geography
14. Cosmopolitanism in the
Anthropology and
Geography


David Harvey



15. Is there Still Room for Freedom? A Commentary on David Harvey’s “Cosmopolitanism in the
Anthropology and
Geography”


Ed Casey



16. Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race


Robert Bernasconi


17. The Darker Side of the Enlightenment: A De-Colonial Reading of Kant’s
Geography


Walter Mignolo



18 Geography Is to History as Woman Is to Man: Kant on Sex, Race, and Geography


Eduardo Mendieta



Contributors

Index

O autorze

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University. He is the author of
Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty and
Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible.
Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. He is the author of
Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory, also published by SUNY Press, and
The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics.