When 18th-century rationalist/empiricist philosophers can't just leave science to the scientists and start trying to use deductive reasoning to explain things like the (putative, nowadays, but not back then) existence of different races of man, things get really stupid really fast. We can't have polygenesis because of Occam's Razor? I mean, I obvs don't believe in polygenesis, but come on now. And I mean, it's awesome when your reason doesn't even show you the many blind spots in your thinking, and you go about confidently proclaiming that the "gypsies" are an "Asian race" because of their language, and you're conflating geography and physiognomy and linguistics, and you're wrong anyway because Romani is an Indo-Aryan language related to the great langs of Europe, and let's not even START to try to unpick what you mean by "Asian". Obviously anything of Kant's is of historical importance, but this won't be of intellectual interest to anyone except for what it says about racial ideologies of the time, or maybe for how it connects them to "teleology", a convoluted relation which I have little interest in spending more time with, since its endpoint appears to be the intrinsic superiority of the European "race". Imagine that.

(Teutscher Merkur.) ( )