Chapter 1. Reading Kant in Herder’s Lecture Notes

Abstract

It would be pleasant to imagine when reading the various student notes from Kant's lectures -those written down by Herder, for instance, in the 1760s -that we were reading notes that Kant himself might just as well have written himself and then read aloud to the class -that the students were acting merely as stenographers of greater or lesser skill.Such pleasant thoughts are quickly dissipated by obvious worries, however.To take as an example Herder's notes from Kant's metaphysics lectures, the notes I wish to discuss here: Are we reading Kant's unadulterated words (if perhaps not all of them) as spoken in the classroom?Or are we reading Herder's thoughts about Kant or about the Baumgarten text from which Kant was lecturing?And even if these words (or at least most of them) are Kant's, how many are just a re-hashing of Baumgarten, as opposed to Kant's own views on the topic at hand?These are reasonable worries, and completely disentangling the principal voices -Kant, Herder, and Baumgarten -is likely a lost cause; but by comparing Herder's notes against Kant's publications of that period, and Kant's own notes jotted down in his copy of Baumgarten, as well as the Baumgarten text itself, we most definitely find unambiguous strands of Kant's voice in the notes.In what follows, I will offer a few general observations on the scholarly use of the student notes from Kant's classroom, and a few more specific observations on the importance of the Herder notes in particular, before reviewing the discussion of real and logical grounds, using this as one example of how much of Kant we can find in the Herder notes.What we discover is a considerable overlap of material between the lecture notes and Kant's published works, as well as a steady engagement with other philosophers of his day.Kant's discussion of ground or reason (German: Grund; Latin: ratio) first appears in his New Elucidation (1755), the first of three public Latin defenses that Kant presented during his teaching career in Königsberg, and it is here that he claims to prefer the term 'determining ground' over Wolff's 'sufficient ground' (or 'sufficient reason').Kant began to use the terms 'real ground' and 'logical ground' in Negative Magnitudes (1763) and Only Possible Argument (1763), and continued to make use of them in various ways throughout his career.The connection between a real ground and its consequence is what we usually call a 'causal relationship', and the connection between a logical ground and its consequence we Authenticated | stevenaragon@frontier.

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