Kant and Forster on the unity of mankind.

In 1786 Georg Forster published a widely read critique of Immanuel Kant's theory of race. Since then, the dispute between Forster and Kant on the unity of mankind has been widely discussed in light of both Forster's essay and Kant's decision to write a lengthy response to Forster in 1788. In this discussion I widen the frame for considering the two positions by focusing on Kant's lectures on Physical Geography. In these notes Kant emerges as an ethnographer asking many of the same questions posed by Forster himself, a man who had become famous since his time spent onboard James Cook's second voyage to the South Pacific (1772-1775). Placing Kant's ethnography in closer conversation with Forster reveals the many similarities (and some well-known differences) between the two. By including some of Forster's other writings from the 1780s in an assessment of their debate, moreover, a much fuller picture can be had regarding natural historical investigations into the unity and difference of mankind at the time.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Annals of Science

• Publication date

  2025-11-10

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Philosophy

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/00033790.2025.2584331PMID 41215558
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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