Between Christmas and New Year I attended a couple of days of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting in Atlanta. The main reason was for an invited session on the Reading Kant’s Geography book I co-edited with Eduardo Mendieta a couple of years ago. There were three papers, from myself, Robert Bernasconi and Robert Louden.

I spoke about the new Natural Science volume of Kant’s writings that includes a translation of the Physical Geography in the problematic 1802 edition;about the work that has been done on the lecture transcripts by Werner Stark; and said a bit about how these lectures helped to understand shifts in Kant’s understanding of ideas of time and space. I also said something about how Eduardo and I came to edit the volume and about the way the contributors helped to write something we’d like to see as a book of many hands, rather than simply a collection of essays. I plan to make the audio recording of my talk available soon. [Update – now available here]

Robert Bernasconi gave a paper about race in the lectures, and especially the way that the recently published Volume 26.1 of the Akademie edition helps to understand shifts in Kant’s thinking. Robert Louden spoke about why the lectures had been neglected in mainstream Kant scholarship, and why philosophers should today take them seriously.

There was also a good session organised by the North American Kant Society on Eckhart Förster‘s recent book The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy. The book looks at the years between the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the completion of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The commentators were Robert Hanna and Michelle Kosch, and Förster gave a spirited response. The book looks a must read – a really interesting work in the history of philosophy.

I also discovered that there is a new book of Kant’s (and his contemporaries’) writings on race coming out with SUNY Press in 2013 – Kant and the Concept of Race. I’ve read the introduction in proof form, and this is going to be a very useful text to have alongside the Natural Science.