Social Aspects of Kant’s Anthropology and Their Influence on the 20th-Century Sociology: Problems and Cases

Abstract

The paper examines the mostly neglected social aspects of Kant’s anthropology, as a foreword to the discussion concerning the influence and the actuality of Kant’s anthropology from the modern perspective of social sciences, and sociology in par ticular. Its first part, containing a brief description of the structure of Kant’s pragmatic anthropology, analyzes its social elements, with an emphasis on the anthropological role of the concept of ‘unsocial sociability’. In the second part, I shed light on the main factors which so far have been a major impediment to a wider sociological reception of Kant’s ideas. In the third part, I address the question of Kant’s influence on the European and American sociology – on the examples of George H. Mead’s pragmatism, Hans Albert’ critical rationalism and philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner.