While Immanuel Kant’s account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality (Thierheit) is virtually unknown. Animality and reason, as pillars of Kant’s vision of human nature, are original and ineradicable. And yet, the relation between them is fraught: at times tense and violent, at other times complementary, even harmonious. Kant on the Human Animal offers the first systematic analysis of this central but neglected dimension of Kant’s philosophy.
 
David Baumeister tracks four decades of Kant’s intellectual development, surveying works published in Kant’s lifetime along with posthumously published notes and student lecture transcripts. They show the crucial role that animality plays in many previously unconnected areas of Kant’s thought, such as his account of the human’s originally quadrupedal posture, his theory of early childhood development, and his conception of the process of human racial differentiation. Beginning with a delineation of Kant’s understanding of the commonalities and differences between humans and other animals, Baumeister focuses on the contribution of animality to Kant’s views of ethics, anthropology, human nature, and race.
 
Placing divergent features of Kant’s thought within a unified interpretive framework, Kant on the Human Animal reveals how, for Kant, becoming human requires that animality not be eclipsed and overcome but rather disciplined and developed. What emerges is a new appreciation of Kant’s human being as the human animal it is.

“There is a plethora of work on Kant’s anthropology, but Baumeister’s clear concentration on Kant’s concern with human animality and its development across his opus is unprecedented. I believe the care and thoroughness of this exploration is especially important, for it compels Kant scholarship to wrestle with the associated issues in a much more subtle and informed manner than hitherto. For those like myself who have been drawn to considerations of the animal-human boundary and the life sciences in Kant and his epoch, this is a welcome study indeed.” —John Zammito, author of The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling— -

“An original and searching exploration of a crucial fault line in Kant’s thought, with important implications for the present. Kant on The Human Animal is essential reading both for Kant specialists and for those with a general interest in the philosophic assumptions that underlie our understanding of ‘human nature.’” —Susan Meld Shell, author of Kant and the Limits of Autonomy— -

“All philosophers are familiar with Kant the philosopher of reason, and many have also come to know Kant the philosopher of humanity. But in recent years scholars have begun to excavate a third Kant: the philosopher of animality. How these three Kants do (or don’t) fit together is and may well remain a contested issue. But David Baumeister’s Kant on the Human Animal is certainly an excellent primer on this third Kant.” —Robert B. Louden, author of Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings— -