What is man?

Abstract

If you were asked to explain philosophy to an anthropologist from Mars, you could do worse than begin with Kant’s three questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? These questions define the project of philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason and they have stood the test of time. It is perhaps more surprising that, in lectures published nineteen years later, Kant subsumes his questions under a fourth. In asking what we can know, what we should do, and what we may hope, he contends, we are asking: What is man? At bottom, all philosophy is anthropology.