Journal of the History of Philosophy

In an age when the use of an approved textbook was required for all lectures held in the kingdom of Prussia, Immanuel Kant's use of such was anything but a formality. The existing exemplars exhibit a density of emendations and notes that is difficult to comprehend without examining a sample page oneself. These typically fill the interleaved blank pages—a common device for lecturing—as well as the margins, the spaces between the lines of text, and even the spaces within the page decorations and majuscules. A single page can contain dozens of individual notes, penned over a span of decades, in which Kant corrects the author, records his own views, reformulates a sentence, gives an example, or sketches part of his latest book. For scholars, such handwritten materials have long provided a wealth of insights into the origins, development, and content of practically every aspect of his philosophy.

One can perhaps appreciate, then, the excitement generated by the discovery of an early exemplar of Kant's metaphysics textbook in the autumn of 2000. His heavily annotated copy of the fourth edition of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Metaphysica (Halle, 1757) had been transcribed in the 1920s by Erich Adickes for the Academy Edition of Kant's writings (vols. 17 and 18), and this material is still being pored over by scholars looking [End Page 691] for fresh insights. But this newly discovered edition of Kant's 1750 exemplar promises to reveal something about his earliest intellectual development as a lecturer, something about which the other available evidence is almost entirely lacking.

Due to the impeccable, decades-long work of Günter Gawlick, Lothar Kreimendahl, and Werner Stark, along with their associates, Michael Oberhausen and Michael Trauth, these earliest reflections and elucidations (as they are sometimes called) are now available for study in a beautiful and thorough edition. The book itself contains an introduction detailing all the technical aspects of the original text and the process of its transcription, as well as some of the more notable philosophical themes covered therein. The main text is a new critical edition of the underlying textbook, with each paragraph of the original being followed by Kant's notes to that section along with a brief indication of their exact location in the text or whether they were penned on a page interleaved into the textbook. The critical apparatus includes historical notes and twelve appendices, which provide indices, tabular overviews of the notes and their placements, and complete bibliographical information for any text to which Kant refers or alludes. In all these respects, the volume is a model of thoroughness.

The philosophical content of Kant's notes, however, is another matter. The light these can shed almost exclusively concerns Kant's intellectual development, and this, only to the extent that they can be precisely dated. As the editors explain in their introduction, in terms of numbers, most of the notes can be dated precisely to the period 1755–56. These are limited, however, mainly to short jottings, examples, references, and the occasional longer correction or statement regarding an argument in Baumgarten's textbook. While specific notes might interest specialists of Kant's early thoughts on some specific topic or concept, the only general takeaway is that the main influence on his thought at this time was the anti-Wolffian philosopher, Christian August Crusius, who is mentioned more than twice as often as any other single author. Christian Wolff takes second place, and there is not a single reference to Locke, Hume, Berkeley, or Rousseau (XLVI–L). Most remarkable in these notes is perhaps the brief statement of the original ontotheological argument Kant articulated in A New Elucidation (1755) and The Only Possible Argument (1763). In other writings of the period, Kant ascribes his discovery of...