Introduction

The paper is a thorough historical and theoretical introduction to the three volume series 'Nietzsche's Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy', edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constancio, and Tom Bailey, and in particular to the first volume “Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics”. It is authored by the two editors of the first volume who are the senior editors of the whole series. Nietzsche has often been considered a thinker independent of the philosophy of his time and radically opposed to the concerns and concepts of modern and contemporary philosophy. But there is an increasing awareness of his sophisticated engagements with his contemporaries. The first two sections of the introduction, “The young Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Kant and Kantianism” (p. 2-9) and “Nietzsche’s criticisms of Kant” (p. 9-13) give a reconstruction of the historical and philological facts concerning respectively in Nietzsche’s formative years up to The Birth of Tragedy (section 1) and in Nietzsche’s later thought. The question of historical mediation – not only through Schopenhauer – arises from the beginning. What Nietzsche could have done as a direct reading would scarcely have been enough to enable him to master Kant’s philosophical writings. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s indirect, mediated contacts with Kant’s philosophy were more than frequent. Whereas he possibly never owned a single work by Kant, a good shelf of his personal library is filled with histories of philosophy (Fischer, Ueberweg), works about Kant (Lehmann, Kohl, Romundt), writings by early neo- Kantians in the narrower sense of the term (Lange, Helmholtz, Fischer, Liebmann) or by philosophers who – even if they did not plea for a ‘return to Kant’ – gave a central place to a critical confrontation with Kant (Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Spir and many others). In general, what Nietzsche’s minor contemporaries held to be Kant’s philosophy is often foreign to us. Thus, in the twenty- first century, the difficulty of understanding Nietzsche’s view of Kant resides not only in Nietzsche’s scarce knowledge of the texts, but also in our own ignorance of the variegated positions of philosophers who do not belong to the ‘mighty dead’. Here the first neo- Kantians, even if they are nowadays known only to scholars and far less than ‘later’ neo- Kantians from Cohen through Natorp to Cassirer, belong to the less obscure figures and are much better known than, for example, Spir, Drossbach or Teichmüller. - The third section of the introduction, the “Outline of the volume” (p. 13-18), gives a survey of the specific topics of the volume together with an outline of its contents.