12 - On the philosophers' medicine of the body (1786)

Summary

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The Latin original of On the Philosophers' Medicine of the Body was in all likelihood delivered by Kant as a public oration on the occasion of the end of his first term as Rector of the University of Königsberg on 1 October 1786. Kant's learned speech places the relation between mind and body in the disciplinary and institutional context of the relation between medicine and philosophy. For Kant, mind and body influence each other both in health and in sickness. Accordingly, Kant assigns a philosophical function to the physician and a medical function to the philosopher: in treating the body, medicine is also able to relieve mental ills; and in teaching and practising the mastery of the body through the mind, philosophy may also achieve the healing of a sick body.

Kant's speech is remarkable for its concern with the bodily causes of mental illnesses. In passing, Kant addresses the much-discussed demise of the philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, who had died earlier the same year. Mendelssohn had been involved in an acrimonious literary dispute with the writer and philosopher, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, over the latter's public charge that their common friend, the writer and philosopher, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, had confessed to not believing in a personal God. Rather than siding with those contemporaries who made Jacobi's conduct responsible for Mendelssohn's death, Kant attributes it to malnutrition caused by Mendelssohn's excessive asceticism.