Kant: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings

This volume collects Kant's most important ethical and anthropological writings from the 1760s, before he developed his critical philosophy. The materials presented here range from the Observations, one of Kant's most elegantly written and immediately popular texts, to the accompanying Remarks which Kant wrote in his personal copy of the Observations and which are translated here in their entirety for the first time. This edition also includes little-known essays as well as personal notes and fragments that reveal the emergence of Kant's complex philosophical ideas. Those familiar with Kant's later works will discover a Kant interested in the ‘beauty' as well as the ‘dignity' of humanity, in human diversity as well as the universality of morals, and in practical concerns rather than abstract philosophizing. Readers will be able to see Kant's development from the Observations through the Remarks towards the moral philosophy that eventually made him famous.

Patrick Frierson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Garrett Fellow in the Humanities at Whitman College, Washington. He is the author of Freedom and Anthropology in Kant's Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 2003). He has also published various articles on Kant and Kant's anthropology, on Adam Smith and on environmental ethics.

Paul Guyer is Professor of Philosophy and Florence R. C. Murray Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of nine books on Kant, including Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (2008), and Values of Beauty (Cambridge, 2005). He has edited numerous volumes on Kant, and is general co-editor, with Allen Wood, of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.