Georg Forster and the Politics of Natural History: A Case Study for Students of Kant

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

Abstract

Anglophone attention to issues of race and racism, with particular attention to Kant and other members of the German Enlightenment, has long been hampered by a lack of critical editions in English. While this is no longer significantly true for Kant studies, it continues to be the case for many of the most relevant works by Georg Forster and Christoph Meiners. This is a problem for philosophers working exclusively in English, and it is one that is only exacerbated by the field’s general lack of interest in not just the intellectual history of philosophy and its figures, but in analyses published in languages other than English today. Ahistorical, monolinguistic approaches become especially problematic, however, when it comes to the philosophical analysis of race and racism, given the need to approach such topics from multiple angles at once—historical, political, cultural, economic, and legal—a fact that is no less true for scholarship on the figures of the eighteenth century than it is for the study of the present one. My aim in what follows therefore is to fill in a bit of the bigger picture, the specific context within which a writer like Georg Forster and his cohort were working, in order to better frame the kinds of specialised discussions of Kant’s philosophy of race that we find today.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch LI, 2024
EditorsCarl Niekirk
Place of PublicationGermany
PublisherWallstein Verlag GmbH
Pages79-90
Number of pages12
Volume51
ISBN (Print)9783835357501
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2025

Notes

WIP PL

emailed re front matter

Keywords

  • Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804
  • Georg Forster, 1754-1794
  • James Cook
  • British Empire
  • French Revolution, 1789-1799
  • American Revolution
  • Benjamin Franklin
  • Botany Bay (N.S.W.)
  • convicts
  • Australian history
  • translation
  • History of Rome

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