Translator's introduction

Summary

This transcription, based on lectures given two years after the Friedländer text, is more fragmentary than Collins, Parow or Friedländer. Unlike the Collins and Parow texts, but like Friedländer manuscripts 399 and 400, it was apparently the work of a single transcriber. After an introduction of about five pages, it is explicitly organized around Baumgarten's paragraphs (§§ 527–655). It too follows the pattern of treating first the theoretical faculty, then taste and genius, followed by a discussion of the faculty of desire and human character.

The portions translated here include most of the introductory and methodological sections, selections from the discussions of the poetic faculty and genius, and selections from the discussion of desire and character, which discuss the human propensity to moral evil in a historical context. Also included here are selections that illustrate the racialist theories to which Kant subscribed, at least until the 1790s.