The Place of Science at Kant's University

Pointing out the need for understanding the relations between the enlightened centre, England and France, and peripheral regions such as Prussia’s eastern provinces, Jan Golinski remarked sixteen years ago that it is not possible any longer to perceive the Enlightenment as a coherent intellectual entity and to articulate the centrality of sci- ence to its existence. One is rather “left only with a multiplicity of specific contexts, each one constituted by numerous (local and temporary) social factors”. Golinski appealed to scholars to dedicate their energies to reconstructing the individual contexts that made the production of science possible. Today, much of Golinski’s appeal remains unfulfilled, although attempts at establishing sets of “Enlightenment geographies” have been presented recently by Golinski himself together with William Clark and Simon Schaffer, in The sciences in enlightened Europe, a volume that contains among others a paper by Clark on physics, astronomy, anthropology and metaphysics in eighteenth-century Prussia. In that paper, Clark considers three epochs and three cities: he begins by dealing with Christian Wolff at Halle while documenting the diffusion of his textbooks; he discusses Leonhard Euler’s years at Berlin’s Royal Academy of Sciences; finally, he arrives at Königsberg and offers some remarks on Immanuel Kant’s innovative views on cosmology, rational theology, and anthropology. This paper concerns the third part of Clark’s paper, and focuses on the intellectual life of the medium-size peripheral university of Königsberg, the alma mater Albertina, as it is mirrored by its course announcements. The latter are documents in which the place of science is illuminated in the most elementary manner, that is, first by indicating the requirements of each discipline and secondly by answering questions such as: Who was teaching what at Königsberg? What textbooks were prescribed for the courses? What textbooks were the most successful? And finally, what authors and what books were seldom or never mentioned?