Reading Kant's Geography

Perspectives on Kant's teachings on geography and how they relate his understanding of the world.
For almost forty years, German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant gave lectures on geography, more than almost any other subject. Kant believed that geography and anthropology together provided knowledge of the world, an empirical ground for his thought. Above all, he thought that knowledge of the world was indispensable to the development of an informed cosmopolitan citizenry that would be self-ruling. While these lectures have received very little attention compared to his work on other subjects, they are an indispensable source of material and insight for understanding his work, specifically his thinking and contributions to anthropology, race theory, space and time, history, the environment and the emergence of a mature public. This indispensable volume brings together world-renowned scholars of geography, philosophy and related disciplines to offer a broad discussion of the importance of Kant’s work on this topic for contemporary philosophical and geographical work.
Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University. He is the author of Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty and Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. He is the author of Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory, also published by SUNY Press, and The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics.