ABSTRACT
The history of the status, as well as the position of memory among similar forces, since the genesis of the modern concept of anthropology (16th century), during the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition, and until Kant, is a history of ascending transformation, a crystallization of both this faculty’s attributes, and also one of great influence on the history of anthropological thought itself. The present essay aims at analyzing how Kant would receive that evolution, and how he would act upon it. That is, by focusing on the “Lectures on Anthropology”, and on “Anthropology on a Pragmatic Point of View”, we wish to inquire to what extent Kant would resume the aforementioned tradition, but, above all, from which point he breaks with it, thus carving he himself a new chapter in that history, and also in the history of anthropology; namely, it is our objective to ascertain Kant’s position regarding Platner or Hume and their conceptions of memory, his scission from the latter two, and his proposition of a whole repositioning, and also revaluation of the status of memory among faculties of the soul; and finally, understanding how Kant succeeds in these purposes, namely, through the concept of judicious memory, the only one which enables not only sciences, but also the productive faculty of imagination, and hence poetry, and therefore the only one able to unite both inferior and superior faculties of the soul and to sow harmony between the latter.
Keywords:
Kant; anthropology; memory; imagination; representation