Kant deals with national characters in the second part of his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view of 1798. Firmly rejecting the climatic theory, he advocates an anti-naturalistic stance. However, Kant is skeptical of Hume’s tenet that nations owe their characters to their different forms of government. In Kant’s view, the most civilized nations are England and France: their characters have to do with purely cultural factors. Complementing each other, the characters of those nations broadly correspond to a masculine and feminine principle, as analyzed by Kant in the previous chapter of his Anthropology. The remaining European and Extra-European nations have a less defined – and, in some cases, mixed – character, that owes something more to the natural dispositions. Yet Kant still manages to avoid naturalistic explanations. In many nations, natural dispositions do prevail over cultural ones, but this simply means that less (and sometimes, nothing) can be said about their characters.
University of Trieste, Italy - ORCID: 0009-0004-0133-7227
Titolo del capitolo
Kant e il carattere dei popoli
Autori
Riccardo Martinelli
Lingua
Italian
DOI
10.36253/978-88-5518-160-0.05
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2020
Copyright
© 2020 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Nazioni come individui
Sottotitolo del libro
Il carattere nazionale fra passato e presente
Curatori
Michela Nacci
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
158
Anno di pubblicazione
2020
Copyright
© 2020 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/978-88-5518-160-0
ISBN Print
978-88-5518-159-4
eISBN (pdf)
978-88-5518-160-0
eISBN (epub)
978-88-5518-161-7
Collana
Studi e saggi
ISSN della collana
2704-6478
e-ISSN della collana
2704-5919