Abstract

This dissertation is about two competing kinds of "laws" operative in nomologically-oriented human science at its historical founding. The first concerns the attempt to establish axiomatic knowledge about human beings as natural objects; the second, the assumption of rational agency based upon a principle of autonomy, or "self-legislation." In this project, these laws appear as elements of the problem of grounding objectivized self-knowledge; and the historical juncture in which this latter acutely confronts the emergence of human science is in Kant's "pragmatic" anthropology. ;Part I identifies key aspects of the modern human sciences regarding this problem as they appeared in the mid-eighteenth century. I then offer two excursi on the contemporary relevance of these aspects for social and political theory. The first considers the concept of autonomy as it functions in a central example of contemporary nomologically-guided human science, rational choice theory. The second takes up the formidable attempt in contemporary German critical theory to rearticulate the concept of autonomy through a shift from a theory of epistemology to one of communication. ;Part II is an analysis of the relationship between two dominant perspectives in Kant's work: the practical positing of the concept of autonomy and the "discipline" of anthropology. Chapter 2.1 is an investigation of Kant's theory of autonomy as an attempt to secure a space for subject freedom by denying access to this latter through positive experience. Chapter 2.2 addresses Kant's anthropological lectures collectively as a "natural doctrine of man" and an original positive human science, and argues that it is a study which must presuppose subject autonomy while excluding such a notion of freedom from its knowledge domain. ;In the final chapter, I explore the effects of this exclusion on the anthropology itself, and consider whether Kant escapes the charge that he levels against his opponent Johann Gottfried von Herder: the surreptitious introduction of metaphysics into a knowledge domain that claims to be free of it. In closing, I suggest that Kant's predicament with anthropology may also be the fate of any "science" of humanity that proceeds according to naturalism alone