Introduction by J. B. Schneewind

Summary

Kant began to teach at the Albertina University in Konigsberg in 1755, when he was thirty-one years old. He taught there for more than four decades, carrying what seems today an astonishingly heavy load. Usually he gave four or five courses each semester, meeting classes four or five hours a week. He taught logic, metaphysics, physical geography, anthropology, and many other subjects. (He even taught the rudiments of making fortifications to the officers of the Russian army that occupied Konigsberg in the late 1750s.) Among his more frequent offerings were courses on ethics: He taught the subject in one form or another nearly thirty times. In 1924, on the occasion of the bicentennial of Kant's birth, the German scholar Paul Menzer published for the first time a full transcript of student notes from one of Kant's lecture courses on ethics. New copies of lecture notes have come to light since then, and some previously known manuscripts have disappeared or become unavailable. In this volume we present student notes covering Kant's ethics courses from near their beginning to the last time he taught the subject.

The importance of these notes differs from the importance of the student notes on subjects, such as logic or physical geography, on which Kant published little or nothing. Kant's published books presented his mature thought on morality quite fully. Some of the early writings yield information about the development of his views, and a number of essays shed further light on his theory and its applications. The student notes on moral philosophy are valuable as supplements to these much discussed texts. They richly repay study, each in a different way.