section_path: Philosophy/Anthropology
section_name: Anthropology
paragraph_text: Anthropology
  
  Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. Transcripts of Kant's lectures on anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
  
  Kant was the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates - Galen four temperaments and plotted in two dimensions "what belongs to a human being's faculty of desire":"his natural aptitude or natural predisposition" and "his temperament or sensibility". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic, phlegmatics as balanced and weak, sanguines as balanced and energetic, and melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits. Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explores the things that a human "can and should make of himself".