Metaphysics – Dohna

The so-called Metaphysics-Dohna is one of the notebooks of university lectures bequeathed by Count Heinrich Ludwig Adolph von Dohna-Wundlacken (1773-1843). In the third semester of his studies at the Albertina University in Königsberg (winter 1792/1793), he studied metaphysics with Professor Immanuel Kant, who was then sixty-seven years old. Dohna-Wundlacken's metaphysics manuscript shows signs of having been copied directly in the classroom, which makes it particularly valuable. It contains the Kantian explanations from Baumgarten's textbook Metaphysica (1739). Baumgarten is considered by Kant to be the greatest metaphysician of his time. There is nothing ignoble about a textbook if the pedagogical objective is not to learn philosophy, but to learn to philosophize. For Kant, learning to philosophize is "exercising the talent of reason by following its general principles in certain existing essays, but always preserving the right of reason to examine these principles in their own sources and to endorse or reject them."

IMMANUEL KANT ME

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