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Kant e il carattere dei popoli

  • Riccardo Martinelli

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.

  • Keywords:
  • Immanuel Kant,
  • Pragmatic Anthropology,
  • National Characters,
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Riccardo Martinelli

University of Trieste, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0001-9876-0697

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  • Publication Year: 2020
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  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Kant e il carattere dei popoli

Authors

Riccardo Martinelli

Language

Italian

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-160-0.05

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2020

Copyright Information

© 2020 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Nazioni come individui

Book Subtitle

Il carattere nazionale fra passato e presente

Editors

Michela Nacci

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

158

Publication Year

2020

Copyright Information

© 2020 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

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

Series Title

Studi e saggi

Series ISSN

2704-6478

Series E-ISSN

2704-5919

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