Rational Psychology and Empirical Psychology in Kant's Lectures

Abstract

Immanuel Kant was concerned with psychology in his first works as well as in his last ones. But he deals with this theme directly in his lectures on psychology and anthropology of 1770s. Published only in 1821, with the lectures on ontology, cosmology and rational theology as Lectures on Metaphysics (Vorlesungen über Methaphysik), the lectures on psychology constitute an essay of empirical psychology and rational psychology. Even if in the Lectures Kant has not yet elaborated the impossibility to know the soul by the a priori principles, the analysis of this work allows us to understand how he came to deny a scientific value to psychology, as he will show directly in the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. The lectures let us also comprehend how Kant could argue that psychology cannot use the method of physical-mathematical sciences, but that of the historical and social ones.