THE CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME

This volume offers a selection of Kant's surviving notes and fragments on topics in logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and aesthetics, drawn almost entirely from the material presented in the third division of Akademie edition of his works as the handschriftliche Nachlaβ, or “handwritten remains.” These materials supplement Kant's published works, his surviving correspondence, and surviving transcriptions of his classroom lectures in providing evidence about Kant's philosophical development through almost all of his career, from the 1750s through the 1790s. They are an unparalleled source for investigation of the genesis, development, and revision of Kant's views and his published works. This is the first extensive selection of them to be translated from German.

The handschriftliche Nachlaβ in the Akademie edition comprises ten volumes, divided into two main parts: volumes 14 through 19 contain notes and fragments organized into volumes representing the subjects of Kant's main lecture courses, and in many cases coming from his annotations in his own copies of the textbooks he used for those courses, while volumes 20 through 23 contain drafts for published or planned works, mostly from Kant's later years, as well as transcriptions from Kant's notes in two of his own works, namely the early Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781).