Method of Teaching in University in <i>M. Immanuel Kant's Announcement of the Programme of his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765-1766</i>

Kant's teaching begins with practicing understanding. He argues that the peculiar nature of philosophy demands it. There then follows the content of his lecture on Metaphysics. The nature peculiar to philosophy is that philosophy is originally an occupation for those who have attained the age of maturity. Difficulties arise when the attempt is made to adapt it to the less practised capacity of youth. This nature demands the practicing of understanding i.e. learning to think. It starts with exercising understanding in empirical judgments. The occupation of philosophy is to learn to philosophize. Here the student is inquiring and judges for himself the judgment of the philosophical writer. In order for youth to reach this stage practicing understanding is necessary. Learning to think is not the teaching of philosophy. It is different from learning to philosophize. The student engages in the latter after the former. Learning to think has a position as preparation for learning to philosophize. This also means it is preparation for inquiry. The learning of being inquiring needs the practiced capacity. In philosophy, the concept of a thing is confusedly or in an insufficiently determinate fashion given. The object of philosophy is difficult to grasp and involved(Inquiry). This situation is one factor that leads to Kant's claim that to learn philosophy is impossible and the youth ought to learn to philosophize. The student ought to learn to philosophize in Metaphysics' empirical psychology and cosmology. The student must practice his understanding before he is introduced to this stage. A.G. Baumgarten's Metaphysics is the textbook which has been chosen for the richness of its contents and the precision of its method. The philosophical writer, however, is not to be regarded as the paradigm of judgement. He ought rather to be taken as the occasion for forming student's own judgement about him, and even, indeed, for passing judgement against him. The exercising understanding in empirical judgements is the development of the ordinary understanding. It is education about the objects of the senses. There is a connection between the development of the sound understanding and science. Everything in the world that presents itself to our senses is examined in empirical psychology, cosmology, ontology of Metaphysics. The objects of empirical judgements are considered in these disciplines, too. The student should be enquiring in the three sciences. The empirical judgements grow into enquiring about the same objects. The development of the sound understanding has a position of the first step toward such a scientific stage. And when we pay attention to the above objects, we can find the following relation between two learnings. Learning by independent thinking activity, the student's being enquiring about these empirical objects demands not memorizing or understanding the empirical concepts about them but attaining them for himself by empirical judgements, that is, the exercise in acquiring concepts by independent thinking activity. It is the learning which needs experience for youth to attain clear knowledge about characteristic mark of objects by using experience for himself.