Immanuel Kant: Neue Reflexionen. Die frühen Notate zu Baumgartens ›Metaphysica‹.

Kant’s so-called reflections are the key documents for reconstructing the history of his philosophical development. This applies particularly to those reflections which Kant noted in his compendium of metaphysics, A.G. Baumgarten’s ›Metaphysica‹, a work which accompanied him longer in his philosophical life than any other and had the greatest influence on his metaphysical thinking. In Volumes XV, XVII and XVIII, the Academy edition of Kant’s writings edited the notes from Kant’s personal copy of the fourth edition of ›Metaphysica‹ (1757). It is well known that Kant had a copy of the third edition (1750) and annotated this. However, this personal copy had previously not been available to those doing research on Kant. It was not discovered until 2000.

This spectacular discovery is being presented here for the first time, along with a detailed introduction, an explanatory apparatus and indexes. Kant made these notes to prepare for the course of lectures on metaphysics which he had announced for the summer semester of 1756. They provide a unique insight into his literary, historical and philosophical interests at the beginning of his academic career and extend far beyond everything which was known up to now. Even at that time, Kant was focusing strongly on the problems of the concept of world which he dealt with later in the antimony of pure reason. He shows a noticeable interest in empirical psychology. Through Baumgarten, Kant became more familiar, on a high philosophical level of reflection, with man as a knowing and willing being, and by studying his analyses he created early on the prerequisites for establishing anthropology as an independent science. Kant had already presented the ontotheological argument for proof of God’s existence in his habilitation thesis, the ›Nova dilucidatio‹ (1755), before putting it at the center of his ›The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God‹ (1763). However, both of these works do not connect this argument with Baumgarten’s name. The early notes close this gap by demonstrating explicitly that Baumgarten influenced these as well.