In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and the Sturm und Drang movement in art and...

If Kant had never made the "critical turn" of 1773, would he be worth more than a paragraph in the history of philosophy? Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know. Zammito also reveals Kant's former student and latter-day rival, Johann Herder, to be a much more philosophically interesting thinker than is usually assumed and, in many important respects, historically as influential as Kant.
Relying on previously unexamined sources,...

Reconstructing the critiques of positivism, John H. Zammito argues that positivist theories of science provide very little support for fashionable postmodern approaches to science studies.

This study interprets debates within the Weimar literary Left over the relation of literature to politics. The historical key to these debates was the German revolution of 1918-1919 and the idea of -Bolshevism-, i.e. a symbolic allegiance to the only successful revolutionary movement of 1917-1920. In covering the arguments of figures like G. Grosz, W. Herzfelde, E. Piscator, J. Becher, A. Doblin, B. Brecht and W. Benjamin, it demonstrates the great ambivalence and historical specificity of the stances writers adopted in the Twenties over the issue of political allegiance to Marxism. Thus the...