Kant's writings in the 1760s document his increasing alienation from the philosophy of his time, which had been shaped mainly by Wolffianism. At the same time, Kant undertook important steps towards a development of his own critical philosophy. The lexical reappraisal of three consecutive writings, each of which has its own main index, concordance and the customary separate indexes, makes this procedure transparent for Kant's metaphysics and ethics through detailed findings of word count statistics. Taken together, the two index volumes 38 and 39 enable us to make verified statements about these pre-critical writings concerning the dates on which the reflections in the literary remains were written, a subject of some controversy, and also enable us to determine more precisely Herder's own part in the transcripts he made of Kant's lectures.
Der sorgfältig erstellte, sehr umfangreiche und dennoch übersichtliche Band besticht durch eine präzise Wortanalyse der drei Texte und bietet die Grundlage für weitere philologische Feinarbeit. [...] [Er] wird sich rasch als eine lohnende Investition herausstellen, weil er allen, die mit dem vorkritischen Kant beschäftigt sind, Wissenschaftlern, aber auch Studierenden, mit dem gewissenhaft aufbereiteten Material neue Möglichkeiten der Textinterpretation eröffnet. Josef Bordat, Marburger Forum