2010 Issue №4(34)

This article compares the concepts of enlightenment formulated by M. Mendelssohn in the article “On the question: what does ‘to enlighten’ mean?” and I. Kant in the article “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”. The author emphasises the paramount significance of Kant’s Copernican turn, which assigns the agent the responsibility for everything they do and everything that depends on them and facilitates, in Habermas’s words, “the structural transformation of the public sphere”.

This article proves that the philosophical system of Kant is a system of transcendental anthropology, which acts a method in Kant’s pragmatic anthropology. The essence of transcendental anthropology is the metaphysics of morals. This role of morals manifests itself in the primacy of practical reason over the theoretical one. The humanity owes its development and existence to the practical reason. In Kant’s system, morality is the essence of humanity.