I’ll be speaking about Kant’s Geography in Atlanta in December at the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. It’s a session on the Reading Kant’s Geography book with Robert Bernasconi and Robert Louden also speaking. Eduardo Mendieta will also be there, though he is on the programme committee so will not have a formal role. My talk will be close to the book’s introduction and the 2009 piece I published in Journal of Historical Geography – nothing new for those who know that work, but the point of the session is to open up the conversation among philosophers.
Immanuel Kant’s lectures on Physical Geography and the relation of his geographical and spatial concerns to his thought more generally are being reassessed. The lectures are finally about to be published in English translation, albeit in the problematic Rink edition. This will make these texts available to a much wider audience.
This talk will examine the history of the lectures and their publication; discuss Kant’s purpose in giving them; and look at the way in which he structured geographical knowledge and understood its relation to history and philosophy. It will open up some of the questions arising from the situation of the lectures in Kant’s work generally; raise some of the issues about the edition being translated; and discuss the position Kant occupies in the discipline of geography as a whole. It trades on the work in the 2012 volume Reading Kant’s Geography (SUNY Press 2012), edited by Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta.
