EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

Kant continued to seek better, or at least more remunerative, employment after his unsuccessful application in 1756 for the professorship of logic and metaphysics, which had been vacant since Martin Knutzen's death in 1751. Thus, in the autumn of 1757, he applied for a teaching position at a local school that had opened up, but was again unsuccessful. In the meantime, however, he attempted to increase the number of students attending his lectures at the university, since each student had to pay him directly, given that he was a Privatdozent, or private lecturer, and not a salaried employee of the university. To this end, on 13 April 1757 Kant published an announcement of his lectures on physical geography for the summer semester, which provided an explanation of what physical geography is (as opposed to mathematical and political geography), and an outline of the content that would be covered in the lectures. In the appendix, which was presumably designed to give students a sense of the character and content of his lectures, Kant raises a series of objections to a plausible-sounding hypothesis concerning whether the moisture of the west winds that pass over Northern Europe stems from the large body of water that the wind had traversed, namely the Atlantic Ocean.