Editor's introduction

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Metaphysica was the leading text of Wolffian rationalism in the late eighteenth century. Kant lectured nearly every year on the Metaphysica, whose fourth part is on natural theology. But he did not often lecture on natural theology by itself. During this critical period he announced lectures on this topic only once, in the winter semester of 1785–86 but J. G. Hamann reports that he lectured on theology to an “astonishing throng” in the winter semester of 1783–84.

Transcriptions from one or both sets of these lectures came into the possession of Friedrich Theodor Rink, the editor during Kant's lifetime of Kant's lectures on physical geography (1802) and pedagogy (1803). After Rink's death in 1810, these materials were purchased, along with other transcriptions of Kant's lectures on metaphysics, by Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz, who first published the Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre in 1817 (second edition, 1830), followed four years later by the Vorlesungen über die Metaphysik (1821).

Kant used three texts in his lecture course: the theology section of Baumgarten's Metaphysica; the Vorbereitung zur natürlichen Theologie by Johann August Eberhard, with whom Kant was involved in a polemical exchange in the early 1790s; and Christoph Meiners, Historia doctrinae de uno vero Deo (1780). The introductory section of the lectures seems to refer mainly to Eberhard (see AK 28:1033), but the lectures as a whole are mostly a commentary on Baumgarten's Metaphysica §§ 815–982.