Kant’s Latin in Class

This chapter shall look into a number of issues, starting with some definitions pertaining to literary genres, passing through institutional requirements con- cerning scheduling and textbooks, and ending with Kant’s use of Latin in class, documented by the substantial number of Latin lines written by Kant in his inter- leaved copy of Georg Friedrich Meier’s Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, which goes back to Kant’s practice of dictating in Latin during his repetitoria. What were the reasons for Kant’s keeping to Latin? The last issue is about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as having been originally conceived as a textbook for lectures on aes- thetics, logic, and metaphysics. This chapter is also about showing the influence on intellectual production of literary genres and especially of those related to academic teaching. Philolo- gists point to the need to keep apart the different roles played, e. g., in ancient philosophy by literary genres such as pragmateía, dialogos, lógos protreptikós, lógos sumpotikós, eisagogé, próblema, diatribé, chreía, aphorismós, apophthegma, gnóme, as well as by Latin genres such as epistulae, consolationes, and memora- bilia (Untersteiner 1980: 51–101). During the last fifty years, not many historians of philosophy have considered it worthy of their efforts to consider the manifold relations between philosophical innovation and literary genres. The information provided by Giorgio Tonelli, who proposed an assessment of Kant’s oeuvre based on titles and formats, stands out (Tonelli 1955: 55). Today, studies like those of Tonelli have been taken as models by researchers who are about to close the gap between “philosophical history of philosophy” and “historical history of philoso- phy,” while elaborating on the interdisciplinary approach of what used to be the “history of ideas” and is now “intellectual history” (Gregory 2006; Hotson 2007; Sgarbi 2010).