Robert Mayhew’s review essay of some books on these topics has just appeared in Journal of Historical Geography (requires subscription). Among the books discussed is Reading Kant’s Geography. Here are a couple of excerpts discussing that book:
For the present reviewer, per contra, the best contributions to this collection are right on time and will have enduring value to the study of both Kant and the history of geography. Pride of place goes to Werner Stark’s analysis of the textual history of Kant’s geography, showing us as it does that there are four main (chronologically sequential) versions of Kant’s lectures in 27 known manuscripts, that both of the versions published towards the end of Kant’s lifetime were nothing like any of the versions he delivered orally and therefore that ‘we must abandon the idea of being able to produce the Physical Geography of Immanuel Kant’ (p. 82). It is very rare that the skills of the bibliographer and the historian of the book are lavished upon geographical writing…
One of the great strengths of Reading Kant’s Geography is that it brings together geographers and philosophers to engage with the nexus between Kant and geography. The philosophical contributions, it has to be said, are mainly concerned with the ‘metaphorics’ of geography…
In the intellectual history of the present, however, Harvey’s approach to Kant is bound to be that most cited by geographers in the coming decades. One hopes this will not mean that Kant’s geography is duly reburied as so much rubbish, given that the other contributors to this collection show us just how much insight it can offer into the history of geography.
