Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant's Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials
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Overview
Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762), an influential German philosopher preceding Immanuel Kant, is remembered mainly as a founder of modern aesthetics. Yet his manual on metaphysics was one of the chief textbooks of philosophical instruction in latter 18th-Century Germany. Originally published in Latin, Kant used the Metaphysics for nearly four decades as the basis for lectures on metaphysics, anthropology and religion. Kant composed many of the preparatory sketches for the Critique of Pure Reason in the blank interleaved pages of his personal copy.
Available for the first time in English, this critical translation draws from the original seven Latin editions and Georg Friedrich Meier’s 18th-century German translation. Together with a historical and philosophical introduction, extensive glossaries and notes, the text is supported by translations of Kant’s elucidations and notes, Eberhard’s insertions in the 1783 German edition and texts from the writings of Meier and Wolff. For scholars of Kant, the German Enlightenment and the history of metaphysics, Alexander Baumgarten’s Metaphysics is an essential, authoritative resource to a significant philosophical text.
The first complete English translation of the single most important and influential textbook on
metaphysics in the German tradition prior to Immanuel Kant.
Includes Eberhard’s insertions in the 1783 German edition and texts from Meier and Wolff.
Includes translations of Kant’s marginalia and selected notes on the work.
Translated from the original Latin and Eberhard’s 18th-century German translation.
The first English translation of an influential work in the history of philosophy.
Detailed Table of contents \ List of illustrations \ Acknowledgements \ Part I: Introduction to the Translation \ Introduction \ 1. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) and Georg Friedrich Meier (1718-1777): A historical sketch \ 2. The philosophical context of the Metaphysics \ 3. Kant’s Handwritten Notes to the Metaphysics \ 4. Notes on this translation \ Part II: The Translation \ Alexander Baumgarten’s Metaphysics \ Johann August Eberhard’s Preface to the Second German Edition (1783) \ Georg Friedrich Meier’s Preface to the First German Translation (1766) \ Preface of the third edition (1750) \ Preface of the second edition (1743) \ To the listener of good will [preface to the first edition](1739) \ Synopsis \ Prolegomena to Metaphysics \ Part I: Ontology \ Prologomena \ Chapter I. The universal internal predicates of a being \ Chapter II. The internal disjunctive predicates of a being \ Chapter III. The relative predicates of a being \ Part II: Cosmology \ Prologomena \ Chapter I. The concept of the world \ Chapter II. The parts of the universe \ Chapter III. The perfection of the universe \ Part III: Psychology \ Prolegomena \ Chapter I. Empirical psychology \ Chapter II. Rational psychology \ Part IIII: Natural theology \ Prolegomena \ Chapter I. The concept of God \ Chapter II. The operations of God \ Part III: Ancillary Materials \ Glossary \ Latin-English \ English-Latin \ Notes and Textual variants \ Selected Bibliography \ Index to the paragraphs of the Metaphysics \ General Index
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Metaphysica was both a refined restatement of the German rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff and an original work of philosophy. Not merely the textbook for Immanuel Kant’s lectures on metaphysics and anthropology, it fundamentally shaped Kant’s “Critical Philosophy” and through that most of later German philosophy. This lucid translation finally makes Baumgarten’s seminal work available in English. Including Kant’s annotations in his own copy of the Metaphysica along with an illuminating introduction and extensive notes and glossary, this volume will be indispensable for all future students of Kant and German philosophy.
Baumgarten’s manual was enormously influential and widely discussed in Kant’s time in matters such as metaphysics, cosmology, and psychology. Kant used it repeatedly in many of his courses and annotated it extensively. This volume offers the first full translation of Baumgarten’s Metaphysics (in its fourth, 1757 edition) in English, inclusive of Kant’s hand-written elucidations. It is a very welcome addition to the primary sources available to scholars. The current state of debate makes this a timely contribution that will help anyone interested in Kant to gauge in a more accurate and historically informed fashion the extent of his relation to his eighteenth-century German predecessors. Fugate and Hymers’ rich, attentive and scrupulous critical notes never make the reader feel unassisted in this undertaking.
- Title: Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant's Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials
- Authors: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Courtney D. Fugate, John Hymers
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781441196224, 9781472570130, 1472570138, 1441196226
- Resource ID: LLS:9781441196224
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T10:55:56Z
Alexander Baumgarten was born in Berlin on 17 June 1714 to Jacob Baumgarten, a Protestant evangelical preacher, and Rosina Elizabeth, née Wiedemannin. After being raised in the pietistic communities of Berlin and later Halle, Baumgarten was among the first to teach the controversial philosophy of Christian Wolff (1769-1764). By order of the king, he moved to Frankfurt on the Order in 1739, where he remained until his death in 1762. While at Frankfurt, Baumgarten wrote his most influential philosophical works: Metaphysics (1739), Philosophical Ethics (1740), and Aesthetics (2 Vols, 1750 & 1757). It is as formulated in these works that the Leibniz-Wolff tradition was chiefly communicated to later German philosophers, including Immanuel Kant. Today Baumgarten is also regarded as a central founder of modern aesthetics.
John Hymers is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at La Salle University, USA, where he teaches modern philosophy.
Courtney D. Fugate is Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.