INTRODUCTION

The Physical Geography has a complex origin that is unique among Kant's publications, and giving an appropriate assessment of its content and significance requires awareness of the distinguishing features of its composition. In the summer semester of 1756, during his second term as a lecturer at the university in Königsberg, Kant offered a class on physical geography and proceeded to deliver lectures on physical geography regularly for the rest of his career. In fact, he gave the lectures a total of forty-nine times before he stopped lecturing altogether during the middle of the summer semester (mid-July) of 1796. One significant change in the lectures occurred after the winter semester of 1772–73, when Kant decided to remove a significant portion of the material that he had covered as part of physical geography and recast it as part of a separate course on anthropology. Thereafter, he alternated his classes on physical geography and anthropology, teaching the former in the summer semesters and the latter in the winter semesters. The only courses that he taught more frequently than physical geography were logic (fifty-six times) and metaphysics (fifty-three times) (which is unsurprising, given that after 1770 he occupied the chair in logic and metaphysics).

Despite his consistent and considerable attention to physical geography, however, Kant did not submit a manuscript to a press for publication, as was the case for almost all the works that are currently referred to as publications by Kant. Instead, very late in his career, after a work called Physical Geography was published under Kant's name by Johann Jakob Wilhelm and Gottfried Vollmer without his permission in 1801, he felt the need to publish an authorized edition. However, by this time, Kant's health was poor and he recognized that he would be unable to accomplish the task on his own. He therefore asked his friend, Friedrich Theodor Rink (1770–1811), who was first a lecturer, then an associate professor of oriental languages, and finally a professor of theology at Königsberg, to undertake the task of preparing a manuscript on his behalf.