Kant's Humorous Writings

While Kant is commonly regarded as one of the most austere philosophers of all time, this book provides quite a different perspective of the founder of transcendental philosophy. Kant is often thought of as being boring, methodical, and humorless. Yet the thirty jokes and anecdotes collected and illustrated here for the first time reveal a man and a thinker who was deeply interested in how humor and laughter shape how we think, feel, and communicate with fellow human beings. In addition to a foreword on Kant’s theory of humor by Noël Carroll as well as Clewis’s informative chapters, Kant’s Humorous Writings contains new translations of Kant’s jokes, quips, and anecdotes. Each of the thirty excerpts is illustrated and supplemented by historical commentaries which explain their significance.

Robert R. Clewis teaches philosophy and is Associate Director of the Honors Program at Gwynedd Mercy University, USA. He is author of The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (2009), a translator in Kant's Lectures on Anthropology (2012), and editor of Reading Kant's Lectures (2015) and The Sublime Reader (Bloomsbury, 2019).